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

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

#71

Post by prmoustache »

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…

Back in the days you would buy printed magazines that contained full basic source code of programs and games and type them on your own text editor. I was a bit too young to do that but I remember watching my older brother just do that and then play games (after finding the typing errors for a while).

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

#73

Post by LeBit »

racingmars wrote: post #68
NuclearPM wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do non-magnetically driven speakers exist?

Yes, electrostatic speakers are a good example. Also a lot of PC motherboards I've had over the years have had the little piezoelectric speaker. And while still magnetic, there are planar magnetic speakers which are much more like electrostatic speakers (just using a magnetic field instead of electric field) than the typical moving coil / dynamic speaker drivers that you think of.

This guy knows speakers.

I have a pair of Magneplanar speakers. They always impress people.

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

#74

Post by ColdStream »

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!

The good news is that 5.25" floppies have tended to be more resilient to time than the 3.5" discs. Turns out just having less data spread over a larger space helped them in this regard.

Hardest part is usually trying to find working drives and a means of getting the data off the system.

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

#76

Post by ColdStream »

vunderba wrote: post #43
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…

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.BA…

Basic and Qbasic represent a part of computer culture that has been lost a little bit. It was the idea of making computers programmable to almost anyone without having to have a deep knowledge of how the system works.

I'm not saying we should go back to BASIC but that spirit of easy to build has been lost a little. Nowadays you need to pull in like 40 dependencies before things can get really moving. Yeah it is OK after that but the barrier to entry can be a little tough at times. This is the same complaint I have about multimedia on the web, Flash solved the issue in a terrible fashion but the core idea was great.

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

#77

Post by VorpalWay »

ColdStream wrote: post #74
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The good news is that 5.25" floppies have tended to be more resilient to time than the 3.5" discs. Turns out just having less data spread over a larger space helped them in this regard. Hardest part is usually trying to find working drives and a means of getting the data off the system.

The best (and most flexible) way to get data of old floppies is https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle which reads the data at a raw magnetic level using a standard floppy drive and a custom open source circuit board which replaces the host controller.

However, if you are specifically dealing with PC floppies, it is potentially overkill (but it might still be the easiest way to hook up a 5.25" floppy drive to a modern computer).

5.25" drives may also need a separate power supply in addition to the greaseweazle, for 3.5" drives the GW has enough power to power the drive directly though.

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

#78

Post by ColdStream »

egypturnash wrote: post #46
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.

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

And that would get you a system that was fairly anemic even for then. There were still some 286 systems being sold then which was 2 full architecture leaps behind at a time when it was starting to become very important.

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

#79

Post by ColdStream »

sedatk wrote: post #23

I once heard the rumor that DONKEY.BAS was the last piece of code Bill Gates wrote himself at Microsoft. I wonder if it's true.

That has all the hall marks of urban legend, but why let the truth get in the way of a great story.

I have said it for a very long time, Gates wasn't innovative in technology but he absolutely innovated in bringing the most ruthless business practices into software.

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

#80

Post by smackeyacky »

flowofcontrol wrote: post #5

my car keeps hitting the donkey when switching lanes even though I'm already well past it..

I haven’t looked at the code but the collision detection was buggy even back in the day. You have to switch lanes while there is nothing or a donkey in front of you. If the donkey is in the other lane it registers a hit even if it looks like you passed it

Edit: line 1750 is where it does a simple collision check and yep looks like it registers a collision without checking you’re past the donkey or not

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