What is REALbasic 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 4.x?

REALbasic (often referred to as "RealBasic" or "RB") was an incredibly easy and powerful integrated development environment that just about anybody could quickly pick up and use to release feature rich, efficient applications and even small games in just days.

RB featured an object-oriented, graphical interface with drag and drop support for controls, such as buttons, listboxes, scrollbars and easy to understand code allowing for invisible controls such as sockets that could be used to make internet enabled apps and games.  It also featured very straightforward QuickTime movies playback integration, AppleEvent integration, serial port communication, printing and sprite surface controls that used very efficient QuickDraw like pragma directives, which disabled all background tasks to speed up graphic animations, allowing to make fluid sprite based games such as RPG and action games.

One nice feature is from within REALbasic, you can hit [CMD-1] keys on your KB at any moment to open the code reference guide window, which has a complete class, operator and functions dictionary.  It explains all the core functions and even gives example code blocks that you can copy/paste in your project to try them.

The initial RB IDE was released for and on Macintosh in 1998 (preceded by CrossBasic from the same author in 1997).

Version 2.0 from 1999 quickly grew to compile for and on Windows platforms as well.

Then, version 3.0 from the year 2000 added OpenGL accelerated 3D graphics integration (called "3D space") for PowerPC natives, it could also now compile Carbon (Mac OS X) binaries and it added a RBScript control, which is a just-in-time interpreter that can evaluate realBasic code at run time.  Version 3.5.2 is the last 68K compatible (FAT) release of REALbasic.

Version 4.0 from early 2002 dropped support for compiling 68K binaries and does not constitute an overall significant release.  It was so unsignificant back then that at the time of writing this, there were not many places online to actually find a copy of this release and even less so to find a serial number that works for this version, meaning there must not have many people having used this particular version.  Therefore, the installer has still been archived here, but it is missing the full release CD image with tutorials.

(not on this page) Version 5.0 from late 2002 constitutes a significant upgrade as it added support for compiling Linux/x86 binaries and support for compiling more modern Windows (NT and XP) and Mac OS X 10.2 to 10.4 binaries, plus hundreds of bug fixes.  Version 5.5.5 is the last version to run on Classic (Mac OS 9).

 

In a nutshell:

Best RB version for compiling Mac OS 7.0 to 8.1 68K binaries (smallest compiled file size) is REALbasic 2.1.2

Best RB version for compiling Mac OS 7.5 to 9.2 68K + PPC (FAT) binaries is REALbasic 3.5.2

Best RB version for compiling Mac OS 8.5 to Mac OS X 10.4 PPC + Windows + Linux/x86 binaries is REALbasic 5.5.5

 

See also: CrossBasic, the REALbasic's unofficial alpha pre-release

 

Download REALbasic 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 4.x for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

• REALbasic 1.x Requirements
  • MC68020
  • System 7.1
  • 3.5 MB RAM
  • 5 MB hard drive space (80 MB for full install)
• REALbasic 2.0 - 3.5 Requirements
  • MC68020
  • Mac OS 7.6.1
  • 4.5 MB RAM
  • 6.5 MB hard drive space
• REALbasic 4.x Requirements
  • PowerPC processor
  • Mac OS 8.1
  • 4.5 MB RAM
  • 6.5 MB hard drive space
• REALbasic 5.5 Requirements
  • PowerPC processor
  • Mac OS 8.6
  • 32 MB RAM
  • 20 MB hard drive space

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Architecture: 68K (68020 or newer) + PPC (+ Carbonized for Mac OS X starting from version 3.0)

At least 3.5 MB of free RAM (recommended more, depending on your project's size)

System 7.1 - Mac OS 9.2.2 - Mac OS X

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver