Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

donkeybas.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 153 posts

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

#131

Post by mycall »

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…

I once heard a digitized version of "Daisy Bell" (DAISY.COM) which sings through IBM PC speaker although of poor bitrate.

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

#132

Post by ygra »

scoot wrote: post #107
_jackdk_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 8088 MPH demo, for example, pushed the PC Speaker pretty far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

Using a sound card (read the comments)

Are you sure? https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player-how...

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

#133

Post by kcartlidge »

lysace wrote: post #122
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.

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.

Loved that game back in the day. Thanks.

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

#134

Post by londons_explore »

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…

It runs fairly well in dosbox in a browser though right? Why port directly?

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

#135

Post by dahart »

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…

> early IBM computers shipped with pretty simple, magnetically driven dynamic speakers

Yes the PC & donkey.bas were monophonic design, but the PCjr shipped with 3-channel polyphonic sound plus a noise generator. It might have been capable of doing the sounds in this port of donkey that took “some liberties”. ;)

I remember some sound demos on the PC that emulated polyphonic sound by fast/audible switching between notes in a chord. Hey it seemed cool at the time. :P I just looked and couldn’t find any quickly enough but bumped into examples of even better true polyphony on the PC achieved by assembly hacking.

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

#136

Post by vunderba »

londons_explore wrote: post #134
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…

It runs fairly well in dosbox in a browser though right? Why port directly?

Great question! So DOSBox, which I absolutely love, has some limitations. For example, you don’t really get a lot of period-accurate virtual devices out of the box, whereas Qbasic-Core tries to recreate the experience of actually having a 386SX/33 MHz computer along with the accompanying peripherals - everything from a LPT-connected dot-matrix printer to a 14.4 kbps Hayes-compatible modem, all of which you can directly interface with.

For me, this project is really a love letter. It’s about recreating that nostalgic experience and also making it something others can just drop in and enjoy. You don't have to install DosBox, track down a copy of QBASIC and configure it with sane defaults for speed since many BAS programs which are CPU dependent are probably going to run way too fast.

You can run it anywhere you have a browser, because it runs entirely client-side. You can even share programs in other sites, since it ships with a small virtual interpreter. That means you can iframe BAS examples if you want to demonstrate how QuickBasic worked.

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

#137

Post by vunderba »

dahart wrote: post #135
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…

> early IBM computers shipped with pretty simple, magnetically driven dynamic speakers Yes the PC & donkey.bas were monophonic design, but the PCjr shipped with 3-channel polyphonic sound plus a noise generator. It might have been capable of doing the sounds in this port of donkey that took “some liberties”. ;) I remember some sound demos on the PC that emulated polyphonic sound by fast/audible switching between note…

> I remember some sound demos on the PC that emulated polyphonic sound by fast/audible switching between notes in a chord

Didn't know that about the PCjr! I'll have to see if I can find some examples of the generator online. Polyphony by rapidly switching between notes in a chord was also one of the common tricks on the SID chip for the C64.

Even though it has separate channels, you could use get away with a single channel to play triads by arpeggiating extremely fast between the three notes.

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

#138

Post by vunderba »

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.

Oh definitely! Some of my earliest memories were my dad helping me type in basic programs that were listed in the popular COMPUTE! magazine back in the day.

  10 PRINT "YOU'RE DEFINITELY GOING TO GET FATIGUED"
  20 PRINT "AFTER A FEW HUNDRED LINES OF TYPING THIS"
  30 PRINT "IN AND MAKE A MISTAKE. HAVE FUN!"
  40 PRINT CHR$(7)

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

#139

Post by vunderba »

shakow wrote: post #108
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…

How comes the modem panel is not “shader-ized” (scanlines + distortion)?

Keen eye! That's an old demo video. The modem panel now (and other panels such as the printer) are now run through the same post-processing shader pipeline as the rest of the editor when you've entered into CRT immersive mode.

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

#140

Post by jkrauska »

grimgrin wrote: post #39
jkrauska wrote: post #2

Inspired by the 45th anniversary of the IBM PC, I got my slopmachine cracking on a port of DONKEY.BAS to work in a browser. Pretty happy with the result. As a young person I remember being fascinated that you could make a game like this with so little code.

nothing novel? just a generated port? - https://gorillas.zone - https://codepen.io/manz/pen/RmEQgv - https://github.com/rizwan-virani/gorillas - https://github.com/theraccoonbear/BrowserGORILLAS.BAS

you can play as the donkey cheat mode sexy bill
Post reply on HN