111–120 of 153 posts
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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…
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.
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Amazing. This is nostalgia heroin for me. How far does the HAL go? Screen 12 and 13, and writing directly to VRAM? WAIT for vsync? Call absolute for mouse usage?
Thanks! I went so far with it that I was honestly questioning my own sanity. The HAL has a virtualized CPU, and I spent more time than I’d care to admit precisely timing instructions on various period-accurate hardware (386SX, 486DX). I even tuned it to the point where programs that take advantage of it actually run faster on the 486 because of the built‑in math coprocessor. > Writing directly to VRAM? WAIT for vsync…
In depth, thoughtful comments about someone deeply passionate about technology were the reason why HN became the place on the web for hackers.
Thanks for keeping the spirit alive!
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aw neat I'd love to try doing this for its predecessor GWBASIC (my first programming language on the Tandy 1000EX)
You absolutely should! I’ve already sunk hundreds of hours into building out the fidelity of QuickBASIC (everything down to emulating memory access so you can simulate realistic PEEKing and POKEing), so I don’t have the sanity points left to tackle any other variants myself, but I’d love to see a GW-BASIC version.
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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.
https://codeberg.org/tkchia/GW-BASIC
There are some binary releases there from 2022, but I did not try those. The binary I built from source has worked very well.
Never tried to build the DOS source, but I really enjoyed playing with the toolchain they included with the MS-DOS 4 source code release. It's pretty much a complete, MIT-licensed (but binary only) Microsoft toolchain (msc, masm, make, link, etc) from ~1988. For some of my recent hobby projects I put that toolchain in my git repos, to have everything self-contained, with DOSBox as a virtual machine both for building and running, and no other dependencies. So I am happy Microsoft released the DOS code, even if I did not look much at the code itself.
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Only if you ignore the 8 bit home computers, we got all BASIC interpreters and machine code for free with each one. And there were "IDEs" that sometimes were offered in cover tapes, at the expense of even lesser RAM, I got one for the Spectrum. And the 8 bit computers with at least 128 KB, already could run CP/M, which opened the door for better BASICs, including compilers.
Definitely. I've used a few of them (Commodore BASIC, Applesoft BASIC) as a kid. I could have worded that a bit better. What i meant was that as far as I'm aware, QBASIC was the first free OS-bundled fully featured BASIC IDE which even by today’s standards still kind of holds up: • find and replace • split panes • an immediate mode • debugging • breakpoints • built‑in help for every basic keyword and command. • editi…
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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."
tangential: I still remember how disappointed I was in PCs being used to a C64 (which was released in 1982) The quality of the games & sound effects was just not on the same level (C64 being much more advanced)
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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.