3 ms·

He could have also written the thing in assembly, stored the machine code in DATA statements, loaded it into an array with a READ/POKE loop, and then called it

He could have also written the thing in assembly, stored the machine code in DATA statements, loaded it into an array with a READ/POKE loop, and then called it with CALL ABSOLUTE. I actually used this technique to replace Nibbles’ busy-waiting delay loop with an invocation of interrupt 0x15 service 0x86.

_Microft 6y ago
Great idea, I thought "too bad that QBasic didn't support assembly", on the other hand - I definitely wrote painting programs that used the mouse in QBasic, so I must have used it one way or another. QuickBasic had support for inline assembly though if I remember correctly?
- mysterydip 6y ago
  I remember the "show the cursor on the screen and grab mouse position and clicks" was a common copy/paste bit of assembly back in the day. Looks like both qbasic and quickbasic supported it: - dim asm as string - concatenate your assembly together - DEF SEG = VARSEG(ASM) - CALL ABSOLUTE(SADD(ASM))
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  QuickBasic could load external libraries (potentially written in C or Assembly), but there was no inline assembly - just CALL ABSOLUTE on binary blobs as with QBasic 1.1.
- elvis70 6y ago
  > QuickBasic had support for inline assembly though if I remember correctly? No but BBC Basic did!