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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

#71

Post by Klathmon »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #59
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Providex (a basic dialect that my company still uses) has a soft-ish limit of around 52000 for line numbers.

You can get around that with some flags, but its more of a pain than its worth.

We tend to go by hundreds for programs, and we have a renumber command, but using it is the nuclear option because it will break goto line number references from outside programs (yeah, that's a very common thing in this language)

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

#73

Post by zamalek »

pantulis wrote: post #70
zamalek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 386 didn't have a color graphics adapter, which required using a program called "Phix" - a terminate-stay-resident that emulated VGA on monochrome. Sadly this completely broke QBASIC (the editor was just a black screen), so I had to reboot the machine (to remove the TSR) in order to hack on GORILLAS.BAS. Compilation times nowadays are still longer than that rigmarole.

But it should have some kind of display adapter, what was it, Hercules? I didn't know of any 386-class computers that didn't carry EGA or higher.

Hercules definitely rings a bell. The Wikipedia page[1] actually explains how the TSR [probably] worked, which seems to not be much as the Hercules seems to be quite elegantly designed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card#CGA_Emu...

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

#74

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #63
coldtea wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 use…

People were amazed at it running on the PC, and running very well.

BTW, I would also build the software on a better machine that had memory protection, get it all working correctly, then port it to DOS. That would greatly cut down on the debugging time.

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

#75

Post by coldtea »

WalterBright wrote: post #63
coldtea wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 use…

People were amazed at it running on the PC, and running very well.

Yes, but the appeareance of Doom on PC is not because PC was a "tinkerer's platform" as the argument in the parent post goes.

The tinkering part leading to the creation of Doom was done on NeXT.

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

#77

Post by userbinator »

ricklamers wrote: post #65
arviewer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that right rear view mirror attached to the left front wheel! ;-)

Now I want to see what Donkey .NET is like ^^

I believe this is the link: http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/b/4/4b400bf9-f71d-4...

Found from some rather more shady-looking sites, but it points back to download.microsoft.com, so I suppose it's legit.

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

#78

Post by TeMPOraL »

homingbrain wrote: post #69
nekopa wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

However, since only one age value can be actually correct in this case, the use of logic looks less like a feature of the programmer's mind and more like a bug.

All three results are close to each other and to the true value, so I'd still call it a feature :).

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

#79

Post by jhbadger »

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…

"Microsoft" Flight Simulator on the PC was actually a version of Sublogic's Flight Simulator for the Apple ][ (although it gets complicated because the classic setting of Chicago's Meigs Field was on the PC first and then backported to the Apple ][ version). But if you were impressed that the flight simulator ran on a 4.77 Mhz PC, how much more amazing that it ran on a 1 Mhz Apple ][?

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

#80

Post by doc_holliday »

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.

Yes! TI Basic on my Texas Instruments graphics calculator was how I spent downtime during math class.

So much so, I remember writing program for solving quadratic equations.

They were supposed to clear the calculators memory during exmas, but the exam invigilators had no idea what calculators could do, so they didn't.

I'd like to think it wasn't cheating... as writing quadratic solver in TI basic is harder than solving simple quadratic equations. And I did do them all by hand anyway in the exams...

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