The best QBasic game ever?

#1

Post by tonteldoos » Tue, Apr 16, 2013, 11:50 PM UTC

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#2

Post by benatkin » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 12:21 AM UTC

I can't find anything definitive but I suspect it would be less confusing to say "created by Microsoft" than "created by IBM". It seems Microsoft developed it but IBM somehow wound up with the copyright. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#3

Post by taternuts » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 12:23 AM UTC

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_...)

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#4

Post by laumars » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 12:25 AM UTC

benatkin wrote: post #2

I can't find anything definitive but I suspect it would be less confusing to say "created by Microsoft" than "created by IBM". It seems Microsoft developed it but IBM somehow wound up with the copyright. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)

Back then Microsoft was working for IBM, so it's not that surprising that IBM ended up with the copyrights for QBASIC. What's more surprising is that IBM didn't end up buying the whole of DOS outright (but that's another topic entirely).

Also, I seem to recall reading (or seeing a video interview) where Bill Gates said QBASIC was his last ever coding job.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#5

Post by Scaevolus » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 12:27 AM UTC

It's written in QB64, a slightly more modern variant of QBasic. http://www.qb64.net/

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#6

Post by laumars » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 12:32 AM UTC

Scaevolus wrote: post #5

It's written in QB64, a slightly more modern variant of QBasic. http://www.qb64.net/

The original QBASIC binary doesn't even run on Windows any more. It requires DOSBox emulation to run.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#7

Post by baddox » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 12:33 AM UTC

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

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#8

Post by tdicola » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 12:33 AM UTC

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 visual basic & a .net wrapper of SDL or some basic graphics library.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#9

Post by jere » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 12:35 AM UTC

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.

Re: The best QBasic game ever?

#10

Post by doktrin » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 12:36 AM UTC

This is very, very cool. Speaking as someone who also wrote QBASIC games as a child, this evokes sharp pangs of nostalgia.

I happen to have an old QBASIC book (pub 1993) next to me, and was skimming through it shortly before coming across this article.

Random file I/O :

    OPEN filename$ FOR RANDOM AS [#]filenumber LEN=recordlength

The book then goes on to provide helpful ways to guesstimate at the record length of a file on disk.

Drawing 2-D "staircases" diagonally in both directions across the screen :

    PSET (0,0) 
    FOR p = 1 TO 25
        LINE -STEP(25,0)
        LINE -STEP(0,15)
    NEXT p
    PSET (639, 0)
    FOR p = 1 TO 25
        LINE -STEP(-25,0)
        LINE -STEP(0,15)
    NEXT p
    END

Nostalgia, indeed :P