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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

#11

Post by dec0dedab0de »

spwa4 wrote: post #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.

Donkey was for basica/gwbasic. Gorillas was for qbasic, like a decade later.

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

#13

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

vunderba wrote: post #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 Mic…

At my first job, our entire order-entry and inventory management system was written in QBASIC. I wish I had the source to try it out with this.

I know someone who might, if we could figure out how to get it off a DOS 5.25" floppy!

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

#14

Post by friarpuck »

Someone gave my grandfather a Games BASICA floppy that had this and other games on it. But this copy had a few games that had been "modified". I remember in DONKEY.BAS, it would curse at you if you hit the donkey. "YOU STUPID SONOFABITCH". We thought it was hilarious. My grandfather was less pleased. He took it away from us when he found out.

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

#15

Post by pavel_lishin »

jkrauska wrote: post #4
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

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

Also, on reflection, I think the firefox window size is half of what I reported - I'm not sure what OSX does to its screenshots, but using SHIFT-CTRL-CMD-3, it's reporting about half that size. Not sure if that makes a difference to your changes (likely not).

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

#17

Post by tancop »

wk_end wrote: post #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…

raylib might do it in less lines. SDL is designed as a cross platform base layer to wrap in another framework not as something you should be using directly.

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

#18

Post by mysterydip »

vunderba wrote: post #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 Mic…

This is fantastic! As one of those kids who spent the early 90s in QBasic, thank you!

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

#19

Post by gxd »

nfriend wrote: post #12

Brings back memories of GORILLA.BAS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)

For those who don't know why GORILLA.BAS is so cool... Back in the day, computers were expensive and games weren't readily available. Sometimes a parent would buy a computer for word processing or spreadsheets or take kids to the office which also had business computers. Children were curious about the computers but there wasn't really anything fun to do with them besides banging on the keyboard...

...Until you found the BASIC dialect that came with MS-DOS, that is! GORILLA.BAS was bundled with DOS and was a fun little game you could play in those computers. It's not like you could access web games on the Internet - there was no Internet!

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