[TacticalCoder]

Lucky you! I had the BASIC cartdrige for the... Atari 2600. It'd come with a joystick in two split halves which, if I remember correctly, you had to plug in the joystick ports (so one in each port). My memory may be failing me for it was a very long time ago. I still fondly remember the first lines I drew, in colors, using BASIC. One of my very first program.

[TedDoesntTalk]

I had BASIC for the Atari 2600 (called Atari VCS at the time). It came with two controllers that had membrane keyboards. There were not enough keys for the alphabet so you had to use key modifiers to type the full A-Z and 0-9 character set. It was immensely tedious and really a bummer to use. I’m surprised you got far enough to do graphics with it. I dont recall being able to do anything except every simple text-based things like:

10 print “hello”

20 goto 10

[robocat]

Good images of the manual and the keyboard overlays: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-basic-programm...

64 bytes of basic tokens - so program size was limited to about 10 short lines.

https://atariprojects.org/2019/12/24/try-basic-programming-o... with video of a program running: https://atariprojects.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/BASIC-V...

[TacticalCoder]

Yup I wrongly wrote "joystick" split in two halves but I meant a keyboard split in two halves. It's the same as you describe. I don't remember much: maybe I'm mistaken my memories of the 2600 for those of the 600 XL.

[flomo]

IIRC it didn't even have strings, but it did have drawing commands.