Shame Sony wasn't pushed to improve YABASIC ..
There were quite a lot of people who wanted this to happen, namely to fix the memory leaks, include some kind of sound support and file handling and other bugs but this never happened.
The thing to remember about it was that Yabasic was only ever bundled on the demo disk to grant it exemption from a console import tax by classifying the console as a programmable computer.
We all thought that Sony was a cool company back then and there were always rumours that these bugs would be fixed.. Sony had even registered some domain names for Yabasic and stuck some comments about the language on there.
As much as we all hoped though, nothing was ever released to patch the language which really sucks.
These days I think there is even more potential for console makers to get a homebrew community going.. Think about it, online play is commonplace now and consoles come with large storage devices, be that memory cards or internal hard drives.
A programmable console with a proper programming language would guarantee purchases from the demoscene, thats for sure, but I guess that the likes of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would rather you shell out serious cash for a dev kit instead, which is a shame.. I think that there are still lots of people out there who have good original ideas but no chance of making them happen on a console... They just buy PC's instead now and make games like World of Goo.... . . .
