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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

#161

Post by sdegutis »

madaxe_again wrote: post #151
segmondy wrote: post #112

Why are people complaining that the game is bad? Really? Can we see what you wrote in 1982? Games like this were quickly hacked together to show the capabilities of the machine. It was done in BASIC for owner's of those machines to play with. If this was a commercial product, it would be written in assembly. If anything, this was likely a demo of Microsoft BASIC, let's not forget that Bill Gate's first product was no…

This was the progenitor of other such classics as gorilla.bas. I liked that it was "poorly" written, as it made it accessible - and I made the leap from c64/amiga/acorn to ms-dos because I knew there was at least one language (basic) on there that I could use. Promptly after switching I learned c and never looked back, but there's a lot to be said for what these early open-source (ykwim) games unlocked. Hell, I start…

Holy nested parenthetical expressions, Batman!

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

#162

Post by mediaserf »

mediaserf wrote: post #139
busterarm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the ST, which would be the competition we're talking about vs the C64, etc.

You can't compare the ST and C64. C64's competition were the Atari 400, 800, XL and XE lines. Most games came out for both platforms. Atari's player missle system was both an advantage and a disadvantage in some respects. The ST and Amiga were competitors but completely different platforms than their respective predecessors. When you're talking Mac - the Apple II would have been the contemporary of the C64 and Atari…

*weren't - I meant that Apple computers _weren't_ completely dysfunctional..

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

#163

Post by Shish2k »

voltagex_ wrote: post #35
hyperpallium wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "any" key also works, as well as the onscreen keys (e.g. F1) It's not surprising that this simulation of a 36 year old 4.77Mhz desktop runs fine in javascript on my 1.3GHz quadcore $40 phone... but in a way, it is.

This makes me wonder how accurate the timing is. I've been looking at the Gameboy Link Cable, which seems to need very low latency. Are we there yet, in the browser?

In the browser, I expect we are (like having two emulator instances in a single web page). Emulating a link cable via web sockets, now that gets interesting...

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

#164

Post by busterarm »

mediaserf wrote: post #162
mediaserf wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't compare the ST and C64. C64's competition were the Atari 400, 800, XL and XE lines. Most games came out for both platforms. Atari's player missle system was both an advantage and a disadvantage in some respects. The ST and Amiga were competitors but completely different platforms than their respective predecessors. When you're talking Mac - the Apple II would have been the contemporary of the C64 and Atari…

*weren't - I meant that Apple computers _weren't_ completely dysfunctional..

I was a Commodore kid, but the one thing Apple had that it didn't was The Robot Odyssey.

Hell of a game.

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

#165

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

kragen wrote: post #149
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistication as the backup alarm on a garbage truck While true, the quality of sound achievable this way is a matter of software. There are many programs that achieved excellent sound quality, playing music even with just a speaker and a TTL drive. Remember, the simplest DAC is PWM into a low-pass filter.

A couple of years back, I burned out a friend's tweeters by hooking up an Arduino's 31.25kHz PWM to his stereo system. Worked fine at first, but it eventually melted his tweeters. I figured the stereo would low-pass-filter the input for me, and I paid the price. The PC speaker didn't have PWM; it had a square-wave generator with adjustable frequency. Very few 1980s programs achieved anything even approaching decent s…

Interesting!

I must be thinking of a different computer then. Perhaps my Radio Shack CoCo. I remember some small computer from the mid-late 80's producing really good music with just a logic output driving the speaker. Was sure it was the IBM/clone.

One of the nice things is that I have original cloth-bound IBM PC 5150 Technical Manuals in my basement so I can actually go look up the schematics of what's driving the speaker :-)

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

#166

Post by wamaral »

Klathmon wrote: post #71
colejohnson66 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I'm curious, is there a specific use case for using such a language today? Is it just legacy?

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

#167

Post by Klathmon »

wamaral wrote: post #166
Klathmon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I'm curious, is there a specific use case for using such a language today? Is it just legacy?

Mostly legacy.

The main application is decades old, and Providex provides a database of sorts, the language/runtime, a GUI toolkit, and the ability to run on windows, linux, and as a web app (you can use a "desktop" application written in providex in the browser, a great idea in principle, but with the cost of each user license of the language becomes cost prohibitive really fast).

So while everyone agrees that providex needs to go, that would mean replacing just about every single aspect of the company's core application GUI, language, database, even simple-ish things like the editor we use (which is built into the language) all need to be replaced. It's not an easy task.

We've started moving away, but it's going to take a lot of time, and a ton of effort. Right now we are still relying on the providex db stuff pretty much across the board (although i'm launching a new node.js+postgresql server in the next month or so), and we are slowly moving our hosted applications to more traditional web languages (we have some PHP, a bunch of javascript, and a little python).

But the language hurts. It is a combination of compiled and interpreted, so unless you jump through hoops files are saved in a binary format, and you can only use their editor. This also locks us into SVN as our source control, as it's the only VCS that providex supports (and even then, it's pretty bad support). There is virtually 0 tooling, nothing is open sourced, and it's really expensive. It's impossible to remove old code as there is 0 safety, any line can be GOTO'd or GOSUB'd by any other program at any time, and while new programs don't do that, the old programs that do are the ones that you want to refactor but can't. There are also programs where we are out of line numbers and need to resort to GOSUB "hacks" to add a line.

But it's not all bad. Being able to use a "drag and drop" visual editor to make a screen that will work on windows, linux, and the web is pretty nice, and having the DB so tightly coupled means stuff like upgrades/downgrades are pretty simple and don't involve multiple systems. It's also a pretty capable language all things considered (it has classes/objects, it's not as slow as i thought it would be, and it runs on anything without any modification).

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

#168

Post by ChickeNES »

Shish2k wrote: post #163
voltagex_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me wonder how accurate the timing is. I've been looking at the Gameboy Link Cable, which seems to need very low latency. Are we there yet, in the browser?

In the browser, I expect we are (like having two emulator instances in a single web page). Emulating a link cable via web sockets, now that gets interesting...

There are a couple of gameboy emulators that can communicate over a TCP connection, I imagine doing the same with Websockets would be fairly trivial.

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

#169

Post by dragonbonheur »

spydum wrote: post #141
dragonbonheur wrote: post #122

People forget that the intention of some programming demos is to explain some concepts simply. The intended audience of that code wasn't some expert programmer - it was for those who wanted to see how things worked so that they could see how the game sucked and once they learned enough they could improve upon it. For expert BASIC code see Nibbles.BAS: http://stanislavs.org/OldPages/stanislavs/src/nibbles.bas

true enough, and I agree, it was just a demo hacked together, but i think the difference you are seeing is both a consequence of nibbles requiring qbasic, and nibbles being developed nearly 10 years later after basic has become quite popular.

There are plenty of magazines on Archive.org where one could also find GW-BASIC or BASICA code.

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

#170

Post by scholia »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #54
ralfd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Ataris were never really that good for gaming either

Atari practically owned the gaming business with its home games consoles, and its first home computers -- the Atari 400 and 800, launched in 1979 -- were the best games machines around at the time.

The Atari ST was the one the audio folks used, and it did play games, just not as well as the Amiga.

Curiously enough, the Amiga was developed by staff from Atari, while the Atari ST was developed by staff from Commodore. (This was after Jack Tramiel left Commodore and bought Atari, which he ran with his sons.)

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