I used to make little games on a SV-328 computer, a predecessor of MSX. The ROM BASIC was really nice, you had access to sprite graphics, the joystick and the sound chip. I think it even had collision detection for the sprites. Some fairly respectable graphical games could be made with just BASIC because of this. Really it's a shame how bad most of the 8-bit BASICs are. I suppose it was a cost-cutting measure to use small ROM chips. The Macintosh had the right idea of putting fast graphics routines in the ROM. (but obviously it cost 10 times more)
I used to make little games on a SV-328 computer, a predecessor of MSX. The ROM BASIC was really nice, you had access to sprite graphics, the joystick and the sound chip. I think it even had collision detection for the sprites. Some fairly respectable graphical games could be made with just BASIC because of this. Really it's a shame how bad most of the 8-bit BASICs are. I suppose it was a cost-cutting measure to use small ROM chips. The Macintosh had the right idea of putting fast graphics routines in the ROM. (but obviously it cost 10 times more)