The best QBasic game ever? • Hacker News Board

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#21

Post by LolWolf » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 1:22 AM UTC

Possibly one of the coolest/most nostalgic things I've seen in some time. Badass indeed.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#22

Post by profquail » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 1:25 AM UTC

taternuts wrote: post #3

There has definitely been additional libraries added since the making of "Gorillas", but still it's pretty impressive. He's been posting updates to /r/gamedev ( http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/12urov/im_making_a_... )

The author also posted a bunch of information about Black Annex on /r/IndieGaming:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/1bqegf/i_put_my...

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#23

Post by songgao » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 1:29 AM UTC

In case anybody also wanna review those classical QBASIC games, I've just found Boxer.app[1], a free DOS emulator on Mac. And there's also a big collection of DOS games for free download[2].

[1] http://boxerapp.com/ [2] http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#24

Post by polemic » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 1:38 AM UTC

Hah, reminds me of back in my grade 8th grade (equivalent - ~13 years old?) 'typing' class (circa 1995) - a friend made a 3d engine in QBasic that let you fly a wireframe spaceship around. It was pretty amazing, all things considered.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#25

Post by shmerl » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 1:43 AM UTC

I remember playing around with that Gorilla code adding custom bananas which exploded half the screen, hehe :)

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#26

Post by Klinky » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 1:43 AM UTC

Probably one of the better games that runs within the original QBASIC was Wetspot/Wetspot 2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv9VDvvGRkQ

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#27

Post by jessedhillon » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 1:48 AM UTC

The gameplay video reminds me of the early 90s game, Syndicate

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicate_(video_game)

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#28

Post by RawData » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 1:50 AM UTC

It's no Nibbles...

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#29

Post by radiowave » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 1:56 AM UTC

jere wrote: post #9

baddox wrote: post #7

How would it perform on a state of the art personal computer in 1991, when Gorillas was released?

It wouldn't according to this: >Black Annex requires at least a 2.6GHz processor due to the scope of the project and the unoptimized multi-dimensional arrays.

And its RAM requirement exceeds what I had in my PC in 1991, by a factor of 1024.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#30

Post by jfim » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 1:58 AM UTC

laumars wrote: post #17

tdicola wrote: post #8

Wow, as someone who played with making games using QBasic on a 486 as a pre-teen I am seriously impressed. I have to chuckle at requiring such a fast processor to run well though. Assuming the author doesn't rely on too many DOS game programming tricks (I remember having to peek and poke various memory locations to trigger esoteric video resolutions, etc.) it probably wouldn't be too hard to convert this to run on vi…

He's already using SDL. Plus, QBASIC64 isn't a DOS environment. In fact, when you look at the specs for QBASIC64 then it's a little less impressive than first made out. It also makes me wander why he didn't just learn VB anyway (as the libraries in QBASIC64 would have required additional learning anyway). Even VB classic would have made more sense. Anyhow, this at least reminds the language elitists that a language i…

It's still impressive, though as you say, much less impressive than it seems at first glance.

Doing anything useful in QBasic was such a major pain; from what I recall, to use the mouse(which wasn't supported), you needed to write an assembly procedure byte by byte, do a CALL ABSOLUTE to jump into that procedure and re-read the cursor position from memory.