Thoreau BASIC is a bootable, bare-metal BASIC interpreter for x86 machines with UEFI firmware, built by a developer called Tarjan and available now on itch.io. It boots directly to a prompt, no OS involved, replicating the immediate-access programming environment of 8-bit home computers like the Commodore 64 and TRS-80.
The interpreter is largely GW-BASIC compatible but strips away the original's memory constraints entirely, using whatever RAM the host system reports, meaning you can run BASIC on a machine with gigabytes of addressable memory. It also adds 24-bit high-resolution graphics, bitmap loading, and multiple simultaneous text windows. These are not trivial additions. The architecture decisions behind fitting all of this into a UEFI-bootable image are worth reading about in detail.
The practical user base for a bare-metal BASIC environment in 2026 is small. That is not the point. What matters is that Tarjan shipped a working, GW-BASIC-compatible runtime that runs before any operating system loads, on modern hardware, with modern display capabilities. The original article links directly to the itch.io page. Go read the feature list before dismissing it.
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