STOS - Basic Language for Making Games

When I got my Atari ST, it didn't come with a good basic language, so I invested some (most) of my piggy-bank in a product called STOS - The Game Creator. It was a basic language specifically created for making games. It is my main source of inspiration for my RetroBox project, so I thought I'd take a trip down memory lane, to reexamine this great little language...

The box came with three discs (for the language, accessories and games, respectively), a language reference card and a printed user guide of approx. 300 pages, which explained the language and tools in details.

One of the really great things with STOS, was that it came with a bunch of specialized editors along with the basic language. It had a sprite editor, which was very easy to use, and an anination editor to go with it.

It also had a "room editor", which allowed you to build tilemaps, and a music editor which allowed for making chiptune music.

The fact that you had all these built-in tools made STOS an incredibly powerful development environment for its time. Even a minumum of previous experience, you could fire it up, doodle a few sprites, make a simple tilemap and start coding the sprite movement and animation using the specialized BASIC commands of the STOS language.

Mandarin Software (who was the publisher) also made a bunch of expansions for STOS, like a set of ready-to-use sprites and a compiler, which made it possible to create stand-alone executables from your Basic source codes, and which also made it run a lot faster.

There was even a sampler extension released, which included a sampling cartridge for digitizing sound, and software for simple manipulation of the sounds, as well as extensions to the STOS language to play sampled sound.

Here's some old ads I came across from back in the days (click to enlarge):

All in all, I really enjoyed making things in STOS, and I'm hoping to be able to make my RetroBox into something similar - an integrated environment which lets anyone create simple games for fun :-)