MSX BASIC

Generally, MSX BASIC is designed to follow GW-BASIC, released the same year for IBM PCs and clones.

[1] During the creation of MSX BASIC, effort was made to make the system flexible and expandable.

At system start-up MSX BASIC is invoked, causing its command prompt to be displayed, unless other software placed in ROM takes control (which is the typical case of game cartridges and disk interfaces, the latter causing the MSX-DOS prompt to be shown if there is a disk present which contains the DOS system files).

The upper 32K are set to RAM, of which about 23K to 28K are available for BASIC code and data (the exact amount depends on the presence of disk controller and on the MSX-DOS kernel version).

All versions are backward compatible and provide new capabilities to fully explore the new and extended hardware found on the newer MSX computers.