A greyscale photo of a donkey appears if you lose badly enough. Surely that wasn't possible in basic with 16 colors??
EDIT: That must be the easter egg mentioned in the repo.
Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
81–90 of 153 posts
Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
#82Brings back memories of GORILLA.BAS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)
GORILLA.BAS got me into programming decades ago. I made an (admittedly partially vibe coded) homage this year: https://gameswithtony.com/gorillas/
First code I ever edited.
First time I played it was 8th grade, in Randy Seaman's Algebra class. He also had wolf3d on that machine.
Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
#83I’m partial to Gorrila.bas
Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
#84This 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..
Ha yes, PC XT clone here! And then eventually, a 486SX around 1993, which was my first foray into Linux.
Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
#85Nice 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…
You used to be able to do surprising things with those old speakers using a timer interrupt: on an IBM XT it was possible to get 8kHz quality out of it, enough to make 4-channel MOD playback sound about as good as hearing it over a phone.
But your more typical use case was to play a single tone for some significant fraction of a second.
Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
#86Nice 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…
aw neat I'd love to try doing this for its predecessor GWBASIC (my first programming language on the Tandy 1000EX)
What's weird is that they did an open-source release of GWBASIC, but it seemed to be in a worse state than the DOS 1/2/4 releases. I don't think there's a turnkey distribution out there outside of digging up your old DOS 4.01 floppies.
Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
#87Nice 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…
You used to be able to do surprising things with those old speakers using a timer interrupt: on an IBM XT it was possible to get 8kHz quality out of it, enough to make 4-channel MOD playback sound about as good as hearing it over a phone. But your more typical use case was to play a single tone for some significant fraction of a second.
The 8088 MPH demo, for example, pushed the PC Speaker pretty far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y
Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
#88Donkey running on a PC 5150: https://youtu.be/kmCMkD1vv0E?si=RqGhqIC-EHVhXnDI&t=145
That video should totally have this as the soundtrack beneath it:
Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was also a very educational experience to start messing with the code until you broke it - forcing you to figure out how to fix it, to get your game back.
My earliest coding memory is messing with the gorilla code to get an advantage playing this against my brother…
My first ever hack was turning off collision detection in nibbles.bas so I could worm right through walls.
Re: Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory
#90Nice 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…
You used to be able to do surprising things with those old speakers using a timer interrupt: on an IBM XT it was possible to get 8kHz quality out of it, enough to make 4-channel MOD playback sound about as good as hearing it over a phone. But your more typical use case was to play a single tone for some significant fraction of a second.
Nice, there’s also a great in-depth article about an album driven entirely using the primitive PC speaker. The whole COM file comes in at around 40 KB, so you can copy it onto an old machine and run it. Some of it you'd swear you're listening to a SID chip~