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Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

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Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#41

Post by deepnet »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #6
screensquid wrote: post #4

Playable here: http://www.pcjs.org/devices/pcx86/machine/5150/cga/64kb/donk... "The above simulation is configured for a clock speed of 4.77Mhz, with 64Kb of RAM and a CGA display, using the original IBM PC Model 5150 ROM BIOS and CGA font ROM. This configuration also includes a predefined state, with PC-DOS 1.0 already booted and DONKEY.BAS ready to run. And now that PCx86 automatically saves all your changes (subje…

I'm disappointed that my iPhone can't drive the car because Apple didn't put directional keys on the onscreen keyboard.

For a sleepy minute there I thought you meant because you were driving and wanted to play donkey.bas while commuting in a self driving car

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#42

Post by deepnet »

donkeyd wrote: post #32

This reminds me about my time writing games in Basic on my calculator during math class. I suck at math because of this, but at least I'm an ok programmer.

I was rather sad when Dijkstra said anyone who learnt on BASIC was irrepairably broken :

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html

The second line of code I ever wrote was in BASIC :

  goto 10

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#43

Post by izacus »

ralfd wrote: post #40
WayneBro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andy Hertzfeld sounds like a sore loser. Why should anyone care what he thinks about games? Macs suck for games and they always have. Every piece of software he's written has been a second rate failure.

> Macs suck for games and they always have Not in the 80s. PCs were DOS machines for the office and if you wanted to play a game the Mac, Atari or Amiga were much nicer plattforms.

Mac with the monochrome screen? Not really. It did have a few games, but the gaming platforms of the time were your C64s, Spectrums, Ataris, Amigas and other more graphically capable TV units.

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#45

Post by [deleted] »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #6
screensquid wrote: post #4

Playable here: http://www.pcjs.org/devices/pcx86/machine/5150/cga/64kb/donk... "The above simulation is configured for a clock speed of 4.77Mhz, with 64Kb of RAM and a CGA display, using the original IBM PC Model 5150 ROM BIOS and CGA font ROM. This configuration also includes a predefined state, with PC-DOS 1.0 already booted and DONKEY.BAS ready to run. And now that PCx86 automatically saves all your changes (subje…

I'm disappointed that my iPhone can't drive the car because Apple didn't put directional keys on the onscreen keyboard.

[deleted]

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#46

Post by dogma1138 »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #6
screensquid wrote: post #4

Playable here: http://www.pcjs.org/devices/pcx86/machine/5150/cga/64kb/donk... "The above simulation is configured for a clock speed of 4.77Mhz, with 64Kb of RAM and a CGA display, using the original IBM PC Model 5150 ROM BIOS and CGA font ROM. This configuration also includes a predefined state, with PC-DOS 1.0 already booted and DONKEY.BAS ready to run. And now that PCx86 automatically saves all your changes (subje…

I'm disappointed that my iPhone can't drive the car because Apple didn't put directional keys on the onscreen keyboard.

Use d and h for left and right worked for me.

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#47

Post by shoo »

nekopa wrote: post #44
max_ wrote: post #30

How old was gates when he wrote this thing??

Ah, programmers. I love how we can show the logic behind 3 correct ages for Bill when he wrote this :)

Then we can don our statistical machine learning hat and make an ensemble model out of the three sub-models.

Unless we do something exotic we're probably going to predict 25 as the point estimate of {24, 25, 26}.

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#48

Post by WalterBright »

MawNicker wrote: post #39
WayneBro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andy Hertzfeld sounds like a sore loser. Why should anyone care what he thinks about games? Macs suck for games and they always have. Every piece of software he's written has been a second rate failure.

Meh. Sort of. He mostly sounds like someone with experience on both platforms who is surprised by the dominance of the one that he considers inferior. His prominence as a developer isn't relevant. I trust that his ability is sufficient and that his experience with the platforms is actual. He is a suitable person to comment on the contrast between them.

Many people did dump on the PC as inferior, but it was a marvelous platform for tinkerers of every sort, and tinker they did. The result was a firehose of applications and hardware add-ons of every sort imaginable, including some unimaginably good ones like Doom.

Programmers were utterly amazed by Doom. Nobody had thought that was possible on the PC hardware.

The first PC Flight Simulator was another astonishing piece of engineering.

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#49

Post by coldtea »

WayneBro wrote: post #28
Jerry2 wrote: post #16

Andy Hertzfeld recollects how Macintosh team dissected the new IBM PC and what they thought of donkey.bas: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

Andy Hertzfeld sounds like a sore loser. Why should anyone care what he thinks about games? Macs suck for games and they always have. Every piece of software he's written has been a second rate failure.

>Andy Hertzfeld sounds like a sore loser.

A proven winner, with significant contributions to the field would be more accurate.

>Why should anyone care what he thinks about games?

It's not what he thinks about games in general, it's what he think about a particular historical artifact that happens to be a game. And people care about his opinion on those times (the website linked is quite popular) because he was an important contributor to that era of computing and the early PC industry.

>Macs suck for games and they always have.

Only for people whose appreciation for games is restricted to the latest, full-blast on the GPU, AAA titles.

>Every piece of software he's written has been a second rate failure.

And it's HE who sounds like a "sore loser"? Oh, the irony.

Re: Donkey – A computer game included with early versions of PC DOS

#50

Post by 91298191 »

WayneBro wrote: post #28
Jerry2 wrote: post #16

Andy Hertzfeld recollects how Macintosh team dissected the new IBM PC and what they thought of donkey.bas: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

Andy Hertzfeld sounds like a sore loser. Why should anyone care what he thinks about games? Macs suck for games and they always have. Every piece of software he's written has been a second rate failure.

Is it possible to get rid of the mentality that anyone who criticizes anything is a hater, a loser or suffering from the sour grapes syndrome?
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