So, nice to meet you again
Always a pleasure to reacquaint oneself with old friends.
What about compatibility with existing ZX-Spectrum 48K software? Both v3 and IV?
Please forgive the SE Basic history lesson, but it's relevant to the compatibility question.
I started in 1999 and worked on it on and off until about 2004 (v0.94). In 2006 I did a bit of refactoring but I didn't publicly release version one, mainly due to ad hominem attacks against me by people who should be ashamed of themselves. The main aim of this version was for extended functionality while retaining as much compatibility as possible.
Fast forward to late 2009 and I designed the ULAplus spec. I thought it would be useful to add some commands to BASIC for it. I finally released version two in 2010. The main aim of this version was to support ULAplus.
At the end of 2009 I realized that I had almost enough code to do an open source version. This would make homebrew machines legal and get the Fuse emulator into Debian main. I released it as ransomware in 2011 after raising money for the Red Cross. The main aim of this version was to provide a full GPL replacement for the ROM. This was made possible by John Grant and Andrew Wright giving me permission to use the ZX81 ROM and the SAM Coupe ROM under the terms of the GPL. This is OpenSE BASIC.
At the end of 2012 after playing around with an emulated Spectranet I realized that it would be nice to have a proper 80x24 display. I wrote some display code for the ZX Spectrum SE and forked OpenSE BASIC to create SE Basic IV. The main aim of this version is to support the Chloe 280SE reference hardware. This is the first version to deliberately sacrifice compatibility for functionality. It's still fairly compatible though. This is SE Basic IV.
Although SE Basic IV is a 32K ROM, the lower ROM works as a standalone 16K ROM. The other ROM is used exclusively for 80x24 mode on the Chloe 280SE reference hardware. As such there's really no need for OpenSE BASIC to support all the extra features, and therefore someone, although not me, could remove all that stuff and develop it further to make it more compatible.
I've got a lot of ideas for new functionality I can add to SE Basic IV and I think frankly people will be astounded by how much I've crammed into 16K. The code base is a little unwieldy at the moment though, being a single assembly file that conditionally builds both ROMs. So before I make a proper start on version 4.1 I am going to fully comment the existing source. This is going to take a while. However, 4.0 ships with Fuse 1.1 and gives everyone the opportunity to try 80x24 mode.
