May 12, 2026
BASIC Instincts on PS2
Yabasic (Yet Another Basic)
The internet is losing it over a tiny old-school coding tool with wild PS2 lore
TLDR: Yabasic, a free beginner-friendly coding tool, is still alive with a recent 2025 release — but the community is obsessed with its strangest chapter: Sony putting it on PS2 discs. Commenters turned the story into a nostalgia party, a tax-loophole meme fest, and a roast of abandoned side projects.
An old-school programming tool called Yabasic — short for “Yet Another BASIC” — just got the kind of attention that makes comment sections go feral. On paper, it’s simple: a free, open-source app that lets people write beginner-friendly programs on Windows and Unix, with a fresh stable release in 2025 and its code living on GitHub. But the real chaos kicked off when people remembered its weirdest flex: Sony once bundled a version on the PlayStation 2 so the console could be framed as more than “just a games machine,” helping dodge European import taxes. Yes, the comments immediately called this the most gloriously petty tax loophole in gaming history.
That revelation completely stole the show. One side of the crowd was hit with pure nostalgia, joking that the PS2 was apparently “a home computer in a fake mustache.” Others were delighted that this humble little language has survived at all, praising the developer for keeping a niche project alive instead of letting it disappear into internet dust. But there was also classic comment-thread snark: some mocked the name Yabasic as the most aggressively honest branding ever, while others roasted the graveyard of side projects and abandoned spin-offs like Flyab and unofficial Yabasic 3.0. The mood was basically equal parts admiration, disbelief, and “wait, this bizarre little thing has lore?” In other words: perfect internet fuel.
Key Points
- •Yabasic is a free, open-source BASIC interpreter for Microsoft Windows and Unix originally developed by Marc-Oliver Ihm.
- •The article lists Yabasic stable release 2.91.4 dated 31 August 2025, with support for x86 and MIPS (Emotion Engine) platforms and .bas/.yab file extensions.
- •From version 2.77.1, Yabasic adopted the MIT License and moved its source code to GitHub to encourage community participation.
- •A related variant called Yab targeted BeOS, ZETA, and Haiku, while Flyab aimed to bring source-compatible GUI capabilities via FLTK but appears to have halted.
- •Sony distributed a PlayStation 2 version of Yabasic on demo discs in PAL territories, and an unofficial Yabasic 3.0 effort later appears to have been abandoned.