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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

#41

Post by dmd »

friarpuck wrote: post #14

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.

I learned most of the best cursing I've ever done from my grandfather. He took pride in teaching his grandkids to curse.

He was involved in setting up the radar systems at Pearl Harbor, much good that did.

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

#42

Post by ligne »

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…

131 lines and about 10% of them are the title/copyright banner. Genuinely impressive in it's terseness

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

#43

Post by vunderba »

gxd wrote: post #19
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…

Just as importantly - it was an all‑in‑one. I think a lot of people tend to forget that there were already plenty of earlier BASIC dialects (GW‑BASIC, Apple II BASIC, C64 BASIC, etc).

However QBASIC was likely the first freely available, all‑in‑one "batteries included" environment that came bundled with MS‑DOS 5 with a relatively friendly IDE that had built‑in help for every single command. GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS were the gateway drugs for many future programmers.

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

#44

Post by vunderba »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #13
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!

That’s awesome. If you ever end up getting a copy of it, I’d love to stress-test QBasic-Core against it since I built in a virtual hard drive to allow File I/O (PUT for random access, PRINT to file number, etc.)

I’ve got a fairly large collection of several hundred programs from the early to late ’90s that I’ve been carefully testing A/B testing against period accurate hardware and my simulator but actual professionally used QBASIC-based applications from back with the source intact are hard to come by.

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

#45

Post by commandlinefan »

ligne wrote: post #42
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…

131 lines and about 10% of them are the title/copyright banner. Genuinely impressive in it's terseness

Nearly a quarter of it is checking for necessary prerequisites, too.

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

#46

Post by egypturnash »

bluedino wrote: post #38
gxd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Back in the day, computers were expensive and games weren't readily available. You could get a PC for a thousand bucks back then, and shareware was a thing in 1990-91. Crystal Caves, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem were huge hits and there were tons of less popular games...not to mention copying commercial games from friends.

$1k in 1990 ~= $2.5k today.

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

#48

Post by vunderba »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #26
EvanAnderson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was more of a Nibbles[0] person. I played it with other people on my XT-class laptop in high school. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(video_game)

I’ve got the music in my head just from seeing it written down. And the sound effect from gorrilla.

Yeah it's very iconic. It’s actually the same melodic motif that’s played in the intro of GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS - it’s a short snippet from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

Kind of reminds me of how most people don’t know “Korobeiniki” (Коробейники) by name, they just call it the Tetris song.

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

#49

Post by d3Xt3r »

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…

And for the slightly younger folks who have more memories of Visual Basic than QBasic, check out GAMBAS: https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html

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

#50

Post by vunderba »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #49
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…

And for the slightly younger folks who have more memories of Visual Basic than QBasic, check out GAMBAS: https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html

Loved Visual Basic! VB3 was probably my first experience as a kid to the idea of “threading” and UI-blocking operations.

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