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Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory

donkeybas.com

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Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory

#4

On my machine, it is flickering like _crazy_, as if it's trying to shift back and forth between two resolutions. OSX, Firefox, browser size 3326×2830 pixels. Only happens at or around that particular size - resizing the window fixes the issue.

maybe fixed. https://github.com/jkrauska/DONKEY.BAS/pull/4

Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory

#7
Nice job. The sound effects are a bit too advanced because early IBM computers shipped with pretty simple, magnetically driven dynamic speakers.

On a related note, I’ve actually spent the last four months working on a 100% faithful adaptation of both QBasic and QuickBasic 4.5 that runs entirely in the browser on a virtual CPU and hardware abstraction layer. It’s a love letter to everyone who learned to program on Microsoft’s BASIC interpreters in the ’80s and early ’90s.

The best compliment I’ve received so far is from friends who grew up in the same era I did: when I fullscreen the browser, a few of them assumed it was a virtual machine running the real thing.

A QBasic port of the original BASIC-based DONKEY.BAS was one of the first programs I got running in it:

https://mordenstar.com/share/qbasic-core-demos

Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory

#8
Ahhh I never saw donkey.bas, and only saw the Microsoft one. You know, when that company cared about being part of the industry, as opposed to being the entire industry, and really want to be 5 other industries to, as they do now.

Gorillas.bas (it's more or less like worms, except with only 1 gorilla per team)

On the plus side: it was much prettier.

Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory

#10
It says something about what a thoughtful development environment these early BASICs were, that you could make a full simple little game like this in only 131 lines even though they're ostensibly far less powerful than modern languages. I'm not sure if you could even get an SDL window open and game loop running in 131 lines of (non-golfed) C.

Never mind how compact, beginner-friendly, and just plain fun they were to use. It's been said countless times but I'll say it again - we've lost something over the years.

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