4 ms·
There were quite a few draw modes (SCREEN 7 had a high resolution, SCREEN 13 had the most colors available), but I would reckon that the text mode was a lot fas
by tetraca 4y ago
There were quite a few draw modes (SCREEN 7 had a high resolution, SCREEN 13 had the most colors available), but I would reckon that the text mode was a lot faster and easier than trying to do things with the built in graphical functions.
If you wanted to make anything mildly complicated you were better off using a community built external graphical libraries (there were two major ones, but their names escape me).
- TonyTrapp 4y agoI can think of a few (DirectQB, BlastLib, UGL, ...) but they all appeared much later than the original QBasic demo programs (late 90s / early 00s). At the time these games were written, if you really wanted faster or better graphics, you probably didn't use QBasic to begin with. And most importantly, if my mind doesn't play tricks on me, I think those libraries only worked with QuickBasic (the commercial compiler), not QBasic (the less feature-right interpreter shipping with MS-DOS). The only assembly speedups you could have in QBasic were through CALL ABSOLUTE.
- tetraca 4y agoAhh, totally forgot that QBasic and QuickBASIC were different. I figure there was no chance that they were going to ever be in a demo program in any case - I just remember it being difficult to make good graphics with the regular drawing tools, while the most interesting games the community was building at the time I was active were all using DirectQB or UGL.