Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

donkeybas.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 153 posts

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

#51

Post by EvanAnderson »

vunderba wrote: post #48
hdgvhicv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love the 1812 Overture, in part, because it has artillery.

"Oh, yes-- I play in the orchestra. I am in the auxiliary percussion and artillery sections."

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

#52

Post by transitorykris »

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.

Modifying those games were the first times I ever touched code! There was one that existed somewhere between DOS 2.0 and 3.2 that simply asked your name, then asked how the hell you got that name. It was maybe half a dozen lines, but easy enough to modify output and learn a bit about variables.

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

#53

Post by vunderba »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #51
vunderba wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love the 1812 Overture, in part, because it has artillery. "Oh, yes-- I play in the orchestra. I am in the auxiliary percussion and artillery sections."

Haha, symphonies with accompanying armaments really make you appreciate where you’re going to be seated as an audience member.

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

#54

Post by Arainach »

QuercusMax wrote: post #40
bluedino wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Crystal Caves! I've been trying to remember the name of that game for ages! I never bought the full version but played the shareware endlessly...

There's a (presumably) excellent modern port of it a available on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1330890/Crystal_Caves_HD/

I say presumably because I played their excellent Secret Agent HD port but haven't played Crystal Caves yet.

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

#55

Post by diegof79 »

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…

What we lost is simplicity across the stack.

I learned to program with BASIC. It was awful. I didn’t know how awful it was until many years later. So I don’t miss the language. But something I miss is how easy it was to learn what your machine was doing.

The DOS boot and config involved only two files: CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, that was it. Most programs were self-contained, so you could copy the directory to a floppy disk and run them on another machine. If you broke something, copy the files again and restart; that was it… I “broke” config and programs many times, and it was a good way to learn.

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

#56

Post by syntheticnature »

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.

As a kid I modified DONKEY.BAS for my younger brother who wanted to play as a donkey avoiding cars. It was a clumsy modification, I didn't account for the differing size of the pseudo-sprites, but it made him happy.

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

#57

Post by gxd »

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.

> You could get a PC for a thousand bucks back then

In the United States... In a lot of countries, computers cost a lot more than that in the local currency which, together with lower salaries, made computers inaccessible to most people.

I remember seeing people playing GORILLA.BAS in computer stores...

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

#59

Post by d3Xt3r »

vunderba wrote: post #50
d3Xt3r wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Remember this? DoEvents

I do remember DoEvents! Sadly it's not present in GAMBAS, but there's WAIT, which is kinda the same: https://gambaswiki.org/wiki/lang/wait

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

#60

Post by makapuf »

mempko wrote: post #28

This is what got me into programming. When I was a kid, I had a shitty 386 because my father got a computer second hand from a friend (we were poor). I was playing the game and then pressed a key and it took me to the basic editor. I was confused with what I saw and started changing things. I changed a number and the size of the explosion on the banana got bigger. My best friend at the time went to computer camp and…

WTF 386 was for me a sci-fi like device I wouldnt dare think about having when I was a kid. I had a very nice 8086 I cherished, with VGA video no less ! (Yes driving a vga card with a 8086 was slow..
Post reply on HN