IBasic

IBasic is a shareware BASIC dialect and development environment for 32-bit Windows, written by Paul Turley and sold by his company Pyxia Development from July 2001. It was aimed at beginners and hobbyists who wanted to write real Windows programs (windows, dialogs, menus, controls, DirectX games) without learning C or paying for Visual Basic. IBasic came in two editions that were technically quite different: the original IBasic Standard, which packaged byte code into stand-alone executables, and IBasic Professional (2004), a true native-code compiler built on an assembler and linker. Pyxia changed hands in 2005 and the product faded away by about 2008. Its design lives on today: Emergence BASIC (now IWBasic) took over IBasic Professional’s dialect, and Creative BASIC keeps the syntax of the original IBasic Standard.

History & Origins

From an Amiga 500 to a Windows shareware product

The only account of IBasic’s origins is a short first-person note at the bottom of Pyxia’s official version history. Its first entry is headed “July 1991 The beginning”:

IBasic was conceived on an Amiga 500 in the basement of my home. After Commodore went belly-up it sat on a shelf for many years until I noticed a great need for a simple to use language that could be used to make fully functional applications.

No Amiga version was ever released. The language that shipped ten years later was a Windows program.

The company name came first. In 2000 the pyxia.com domain belonged to Pyxia Computers and Software, an online PC shop in Niagara, Wisconsin, run under the name Pyxia Development. A capture from April 2001 shows a notice that the computer business was closing. By September 2001 the same domain was offering “IBasic Shareware”, and by January 2002 it described itself as a software house: “IBasic programming language. Create stand alone Windows 95/98/ME/2000 and XP programs.” By late 2002 the company profile said “Pyxia Development, formed in 1999”, and its postal address was “c/o Paul Turley” in Cassadaga, New York.

Fast iteration in 2001 and 2002

The version history shows a release cycle that was unusually fast, even for shareware. The earliest numbered entry is 1.01 on 23 July 2001. More than thirty dated releases follow before the end of 2002, many of them adding major features:

Upgrades were free to registered users. Pyxia’s FAQ explained the pace with “We listen to our users and incorporate many suggestions into the software.” In August 2002 the shareware download was version 1.97 SP2, a 2.21 MB zip priced at US$24.95. By December 2002 the price was US$34.95, and the site was announcing the first issue of an IBasic Monthly newsletter and pointing users to the Pyxia forums for support.

Idigicon and IBasic Professional

On 25 March 2003 Pyxia announced a publishing deal: Idigicon Ltd of the UK became “the official publisher of the IBasic line of compilers.” In the same year Turley started a second, more ambitious product. IBasic Professional entered beta on 16 December 2003, reached “final release preparation” on 26 April 2004, and went on sale on 28 May 2004. The original product was renamed IBasic Standard. By mid-2004 it was also sold as a boxed CD edition that came with a 270-page printed manual.

Pro releases were frequent through the first half of 2005. The IDE went from 1.04 (December 2004) to 1.3 (26 June 2005), adding a menu editor, a GUI-designer grid, static-library output and a windows.inc converted from Visual Basic 6’s API declarations. In early 2005 Pyxia sold an “IBasic Gold CD” bundle, and it then started selling source licences for the Pro core command library and the 2D DirectX pak.

Change of ownership and decline

Pyxia’s contact page names Paul Turley in Cassadaga as late as April 2005. From August 2005 it names Thomas G. Hanlin III in Phoenix, Arizona. The terms of the sale were never published. After the sale the IBasic Professional change log has no new entries past June 2005, although the home page kept advertising “version 1.3” into 2007 and the prices kept changing (Pro at US$74.95 and Standard at US$19.95 by 2006-2007). The IWBasic User’s Guide later said that the new owner “almost immediately abandoned the two languages and shut down the support forum.” By September 2007 the pyxia.com home page showed only a database error, and later captures show the domain no longer carried the product.

According to the history in the IWBasic User’s Guide (Ionic Wind, 2016), “there was such a clamor from the User base that the original author decided to create two new languages” that would be “as completely as possible, backward compatible with the two original languages”: Creative BASIC, an interpreter for IBasic Standard users, and Emergence BASIC, a compiler for IBasic Pro users. They appeared under the name Ionic Wind Software. By November 2005 its site was selling alphas of Aurora, a compiler with a C-like syntax, and in late 2006 it added Emergence BASIC. The ionicwind.com description of Emergence BASIC is almost word for word the IBasic Professional feature list, with OOP support, built-in database, a DirectX 9 3D engine and Unicode added on top. The same guide says the two new languages were later sold, and changed hands again, before the current owner reworked Emergence BASIC and renamed it IWBasic. It does not date either step. Ionic Wind still offers Creative BASIC, which its site says “is syntax-compatible with the original IBasic Standard language”.

Design Philosophy

Pyxia’s slogan was “IBasic is what a language should be; Simple, Fast, Lean, and Powerful.” Its feature comparison page describes the two editions as having opposite priorities.

• IBasic Standard was “designed to be an all-in-one self contained language that is easy to use and learn.” It shielded the programmer “from common mistakes such as overwriting the end of strings, using NULL pointers, and accessing arrays beyond their limits,” and “speed of code execution was secondary to convenience and friendliness.”
• IBasic Professional “compiles through the use of a separate assembler and linker allowing all of the features of a traditional compiler such as C or Delphi.” Code compatibility with Standard “was a priority”, and “most programs can be converted for use with IBasic Professional with relative ease.” Ionic Wind’s later account is blunter: Professional “was not backward compatible” with the original, and the result was “a split in the User base”.

Both editions promised no external runtime. Pyxia’s FAQ insisted that “unlike other BASIC’s, the executables IBasic creates are completely stand alone”. For IBasic Standard this was a packaging claim: the comparison chart itself says Standard “compiles to interpreted byte code”, not machine code. Only Professional compiled to native code. Early marketing also called IBasic “faster than VB and easier to learn”. Pyxia never published a benchmark for the speed half of that claim, and the wording disappeared from the home page in early 2003.

Key Features

The language

IBasic uses keyword-heavy, line-oriented BASIC with structured control flow and no line numbers. Some characteristic features:

• Declarations with DEF ... AS (the AS keyword arrived in 1.98 Rev 2 in October 2002, and DIM was accepted from 1.99), with numeric types from CHAR and WORD to INT64/UINT64 and DOUBLE, plus STRING, the larger ISTRING, POINTER and user-defined TYPE structures.
• Event-driven windows. OPENWINDOW and DIALOG statements take the name of a handler subroutine. The handler examines system variables such as @MESSAGE and @MENUNUM, compared against constants like @IDCLOSEWINDOW, @IDMENUPICK and @IDSIZE. WAITUNTIL runs the message loop.
• High-level Windows commands. CONTROL, BEGINMENU/MENUITEM, FILEREQUEST, SETCONTROLCOLOR and an embedded HTML browser control wrap common Win32 tasks, while DECLARE gives direct access to DLLs and the Windows API.
• Built-in graphics and multimedia. The language has graphics primitives, bitmap/JPEG/GIF loading and wave playback, plus DirectX commands (sprites, screens, scrolling tile maps) and a Direct3D command set with lights, cameras, shapes and scenes.

Example

This is an excerpt from the example published on Pyxia’s IBasic Professional “Example Syntax” page, a minimal Notepad-style editor. A window with a menu is created, a handler subroutine is attached, and WAITUNTIL processes messages until the window is closed:

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DEF win AS WINDOW
DEF left,top,width,height AS INT
run = 0
'Open our main window, get its client size and create the control
OPENWINDOW win,0,0,640,400,@SIZE|@MINBOX|@MAXBOX|@MAXIMIZED,0,"EDITOR",&mainwindow
GETCLIENTSIZE win,left,top,width,height
CONTROL win,@EDIT,"",left,top,width,height,@CTEDITMULTI|@HSCROLL|@VSCROLL,1
BEGINMENU win
 MENUTITLE "&File"
 MENUITEM "&Quit",0,3
ENDMENU
'process messages until somebody closes us
run = 1
WAITUNTIL run=0
CLOSEWINDOW win
END

SUB mainwindow
SELECT @MESSAGE
  CASE @IDCLOSEWINDOW
    run = 0
  CASE @IDSIZE
    IF run
      GETCLIENTSIZE win,left,top,width,height
      SETSIZE win,left,top,width,height,1
    ENDIF
  CASE @IDMENUPICK
    SELECT @MENUNUM
      CASE 3
        'quit the program
        run = 0
    ENDSELECT
ENDSELECT
RETURN
ENDSUB

(The published program also has Load, Save, Print and font menu items, each handled by a GOSUB, and the declarations they need. They are trimmed here; the remaining lines are as published.)

Standard versus Professional

Pyxia’s 2004 comparison chart sets out the technical split between the editions:

The 2005 Pro change log shows how the toolchain worked: NASM as the assembler (it notes NASM’s 65,535-relocations-per-object limit), the GoRC resource compiler, and an ar.exe librarian (added in June 2005) for static libraries. Add-on command paks were COFF libraries whose commands and documentation merged into the IDE, so the language could be extended without reinstalling the compiler.

Development environment

Both editions came with an IDE that combined an editor, a source-level debugger, a GUI/dialog designer and a resource compiler, all able to run programs directly. Professional added project management, a menu editor and command-line versions of every tool. The minimum requirements were modest even for the time: a 166 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM for Standard (64 MB for the Pro IDE), on Windows 95 OSR2 or NT 4.0 and later. The DirectX features needed DirectX 7.0 or later.

Evolution

IBasic’s history falls into three phases:

1. 2001-2003, the Standard years. IBasic Standard grew from a simple interpreter-backed environment into a full Windows toolkit through a constant stream of point releases. DirectX, Direct3D, an embedded browser, rich-edit and list-view controls, 64-bit integers and a resource compiler all arrived within about eighteen months.
2. 2003-2005, Professional. Turley rebuilt the language as a true compiler with a modular, extensible command set. Pyxia said most Standard code could be converted “with relative ease”, though Ionic Wind later called Professional “not backward compatible”. Professional’s last change-log entry was IDE 1.3 / compiler 1.2 in June 2005. Standard’s last release was 2.02D in January 2005.
3. 2005 onward, after Pyxia. Pyxia passed to Thomas Hanlin and no further development of either edition is documented. IBasic’s original author continued the language under new names at Ionic Wind. Emergence BASIC carried the Professional dialect forward, adding object-oriented programming among other things. After the languages changed hands again, it was renamed IWBasic. Creative BASIC preserves the Standard syntax.

Current Relevance

IBasic itself is discontinued. Pyxia’s site is long gone, the product is not sold, and the binaries survive only on old download mirrors and archives. Its code, however, is not entirely stranded. As of 2026 Ionic Wind Software (ionicwind.com) still offers IWBasic, a 32-bit compiler “with procedural and OOP styles” that descends from Emergence BASIC, and Creative BASIC for IBasic Standard-style programs. Ionic Wind is also working on IWBC, a beta compiler that sends the same .iwb dialect through LLVM to produce native executables, with a self-contained x64 Windows beta and a Linux build, with macOS, iOS and Android on its roadmap. The Ionic Wind forums are still active, with posts in 2026.

Why It Matters

IBasic belongs to a wave of small, independent Windows BASICs, alongside Liberty BASIC, PureBasic, RapidQ and HotBasic, that offered hobbyists a cheaper, runtime-free alternative to Visual Basic for writing Windows programs. Its own contributions were:

• A gentle way into Win32 programming. Handler subroutines that switch on @MESSAGE taught the Windows message loop to beginners without hiding it completely.
• Game programming without C. DirectX sprites, tile maps and Direct3D scenes were built into a US$25-35 shareware product as early as 2002.
• A dialect that outlived its company. Through Emergence BASIC, IWBasic, Creative BASIC and now IWBC, programs written in IBasic’s dialect remain usable two decades after the first release, at a time when many commercial BASICs of the same era have vanished completely.