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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

#121

Post by inigyou »

Arainach wrote: post #54
QuercusMax wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are also infinite clones of it. But I'm not aware of any open source one yet

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

#122

Post by lysace »

codebje wrote: post #85
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…

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.

Mach 3 by Loriciels (France) from 1987 is impressive in this regard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chJrd9Kxbdw

It somehow sounds even better on an actual 80s PC, with the bass sound being amplified by the massive steel enclosure.

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

#123

Post by pjmlp »

1313ed01 wrote: post #117
vunderba wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even as someone that grew up with GW-BASIC and had moved on to Turbo Pascal by the time qbasic came out, I must say you have a point. I think however that the more traditional BASIC "IDE" with line numbers etc, used in GW-BASIC, has its charm and is still fun to play with. It's quite unlike any modern IDE, but there is some logic to it and with some practice it isn't bad for what it needed to do.

You already had Turbo BASIC by then, what the OP is right about is QBASIC being freely available.

In terms of commercial products, there were already a few to chose from, including the big brother Quick BASIC, which introduced its IDE in 1986.

QBASIC was a subset from QuickBASIC 4.5.

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

#125

Post by pjmlp »

codebje wrote: post #85
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…

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.

Yes, a friend of mine had a Turbo Pascal library (aka unit) that he used as alternative when no sound card was available, for his games.

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

#126

Post by pjmlp »

vunderba wrote: post #90
codebje wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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~ https://habr.com/en/articles/439192 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUy1MEpqbvk

Note for the audience that COM files were limited to 64 KB, thus not much left and naturally it was all done in Assembly.

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

#127

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Before that we had the BASIC dialect that came with ROM on power up. :)

And this is how we got many of our games from the local library, or bookstore, Atari as example, but similar existed for the other 8 bit home computers,

https://www.atariarchives.org

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

#128

Post by JoeDaDude »

nfriend wrote: post #12

Brings back memories of GORILLA.BAS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)

I remember hacking GORILLA.BAS code, which was on our office computers, to randomize gravity for my opponent, the result being they could not accurately predict where their bananas would go. I was an unbeatable legend for a while.

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

#129

Post by pjmlp »

spwa4 wrote: post #112
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donkey was for basica/gwbasic. Gorillas was for qbasic, like a decade later.

Nice. First DOS I actually installed was Dos 6.22 and first one I worked on was DOS 5.0. Never actually used gwbasic, I was stuck on Commodore 64 until DOS 5.0.

DOS 5 is when edit and qbasic were introduced, after the DOS 4.0 failure.

Similar experience I was stuck with Timex 2068 until the 386SX kind of became affordable enough for leasing, however our school had computer labs, thus I did my typography lessons on MS-DOS 3.3, on nice 5.25" inch floppies.

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

#130

Post by NoGravitas »

codebje wrote: post #85
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…

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.

This was on a 386, not an XT, but I had a shareware driver for Windows 3.1 that provided that for the regular Windows sound APIs.
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