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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

#51

Post by eggy »

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.

I agree, and I think that is a common problem with purely technical people. They don't include all of the other important factors: affordability, support (by the company and number of people around you familiar with the system), and many others.

The Amiga sound and graphics chips blew other systems out of the water technically, and did good with the consumer offerings like the A500, but aside from a niche in the video editing market (Toaster on A1000/A2000), Macs and PCs swamped it in sales numbers.

I have had a lot of systems starting in 1978 with an all-in-one CPM PET with a cassette drive to load programs, a very small green text terminal, and 8K RAM. I paid $800 for it used, and another $850 for a 32K Ram upgrade the year after. You could 'pop the hood' like an old American muscle car, and check the board inside, and install the RAM card. I wrote a horse racing game in 1979 using just ASCII characters with random trots, and an odds and bettings system for my two horse-loving, OTB-visting parents.

I have only really lusted after three machines: A Lisp Machine, Silicon Graphics workstation, and the NeXT machine, again all technically brilliant, but not the biggest sellers. Pricey because of that.

The best tech doesn't always win by default, and that's not always a bad thing (as I once thought).

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

#52

Post by coldtea »

WalterBright wrote: post #48
MawNicker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 piec…

>The result was a firehose of applications and hardware add-ons of every sort imaginable, including some unimaginably good ones like Doom.

Huh?

Doom was developed on NeXT workstations, under the NEXTSTEP operating system. The Doom game engine was programmed in C, and the editing tools were written in Objective-C. The engine was first compiled with Intel's C compiler for DOS, but later Watcom's C/C++ compiler was used. (Wikipedia)

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

#53

Post by DanBC »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #17
pythonistah wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The line numbers in BASIC were arbitrary. People often started at higher numbers and jumped by 10 in case they had to put code or comments before or between lines.

Could line numbers be out of order? Like, if I did this: 10 PRINT "1" 30 PRINT "2" 20 GOTO 10 What would print out? Just a bunch of "1"s or "12"s?

If you typed those lines, then issued a

    LIST
command, the interpreter would return

    10 PRINT "1"
    20 GOTO 10
    30 PRINT "2"
You don't have to type LIST to reorder the lines, that just shows the re-ordering to you. If you didn't type LIST, but did type RUN (with the "unordered" listing) the interpreter would run each line in sequence of line number.

If you ran out of line numbers you could sometimes RENUMber the listing.

Here's Stackoverflow:

This question is marked as a duplicate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2435488/why-basic-had-num...

Here's the closed question it's marked as a duplicate of: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/541421/why-did-we-bother-...

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

#54

Post by jonathanstrange »

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.

The C64 was vastly superior for games, and the Amiga anyway. Macs never played a role for gaming at this time, because of their price and distribution channels. Only fairly rich professors and graphic artists were able to afford one.

Ataris were never really that good for gaming either, but they were used a lot by pro audio folks. They had superior midi capabilities and programs.

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

#55

Post by alblue »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #17
pythonistah wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The line numbers in BASIC were arbitrary. People often started at higher numbers and jumped by 10 in case they had to put code or comments before or between lines.

Could line numbers be out of order? Like, if I did this: 10 PRINT "1" 30 PRINT "2" 20 GOTO 10 What would print out? Just a bunch of "1"s or "12"s?

It would print out a series of 1s. It is the same as if you had entered

10 PRINT "1" 20 GOTO 10 30 PRINT "2"

The reason this is allowed is because it let you rewrite existing programs; if you later entered

10 PRINT "Hello World"

It would replace the original line 10 and use this one instead.

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

#56

Post by andyjohnson0 »

Iv wrote: post #29
colejohnson66 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could line numbers be out of order? Like, if I did this: 10 PRINT "1" 30 PRINT "2" 20 GOTO 10 What would print out? Just a bunch of "1"s or "12"s?

It would only print "1"s. The thing is that basic programs were not entered through a 2D text-editor per rather line per line. You would type "LIST" to re-read the whole program you typed so far, with the lines in the correct order. Then, you would enter a line starting with a number. It would overwrite any existing line with the same number. Typically, a way to correct the program you wrote would be to type: 30 15 P…

Just to add that some BASIC dialects had a RENUMBER or RENUM command that would change all line numbers and references to use a consistent interval. Without that, programs could become hard to modify due to the "gaps" between the lines closing-up.

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

#57

Post by DanBC »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #56
Iv wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would only print "1"s. The thing is that basic programs were not entered through a 2D text-editor per rather line per line. You would type "LIST" to re-read the whole program you typed so far, with the lines in the correct order. Then, you would enter a line starting with a number. It would overwrite any existing line with the same number. Typically, a way to correct the program you wrote would be to type: 30 15 P…

Just to add that some BASIC dialects had a RENUMBER or RENUM command that would change all line numbers and references to use a consistent interval. Without that, programs could become hard to modify due to the "gaps" between the lines closing-up.

Which is one cause of the spaghetti:

    17 GOSUB 5500

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

#58

Post by colejohnson66 »

kqr wrote: post #23
allenu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets run in the correct order. Think of each line as a command that stores the instruction immediately at that line number. You could actually "re-type" a line later by reusing the same line number but replacing it with new contents.

"Correct" order is ambiguous to someone asking that question in the first place.

It sounds like he's saying the "line number" is just the index to a tokenized list (i.e. line 15 is at `lines[15]') where unused lines are just nops. So my "program" would be tokenized and the lines stored like:

    char** lines = malloc(...);
    lines[10] = &line1;
    lines[30] = &line2;
    lines[20] = &line3;
Then when executing, it starts at `lines[0]', sees nops, gets to `lines[10]' and runs it, sees more nops, gets to `lines[20]' and jumps to `lines[10]'. All the while ignoring `lines[21]' and up.

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

#59

Post by colejohnson66 »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #56
Iv wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would only print "1"s. The thing is that basic programs were not entered through a 2D text-editor per rather line per line. You would type "LIST" to re-read the whole program you typed so far, with the lines in the correct order. Then, you would enter a line starting with a number. It would overwrite any existing line with the same number. Typically, a way to correct the program you wrote would be to type: 30 15 P…

Just to add that some BASIC dialects had a RENUMBER or RENUM command that would change all line numbers and references to use a consistent interval. Without that, programs could become hard to modify due to the "gaps" between the lines closing-up.

Couldn't you just increment by 100? Or even 1000? Why did everyone use 10? Was it some interpreter limit that didn't allow line numbers above a certain amount (like 2^15 on a 16-bit CPU)?

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

#60

Post by lanevorockz »

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...

Agree with the article, the code is not to be proud of. One thing about the Macintosh, it was better but the price was way higher. Most people stayed with the z80s that costed a fraction and were as good for games.
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