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Currently reading The BLUE Book About GW-BASIC and QuickBasic (Thomas C. McIntire, 1991, https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic https://github.com/robh
by 2mlWQbCK 2y ago
Currently reading The BLUE Book About GW-BASIC and QuickBasic (Thomas C. McIntire, 1991, https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic).
It is full of fascinating and somewhat horrible advice. For rendering text-mode user interfaces the author recommends having a ~4000 bytes binary file saved that is just BLOADed straight from disk into graphics RAM (in text-mode that sets all the text and attributes/colors for the screen). Tricks like that would probably never cross my mind, being used to having to load some library to draw anything to a screen.
I discovered just some day ago pc-basic is a really impressive project. pip install pcbasic gives you a portable python-implementation of essentially GW-BASIC, running in a terminal or graphics window. But you can of course also grab the MIT-licensed GW-BASIC 1.0 that Microsoft released a few years ago (and that TK Chia modified to make it possible to build) and run that in DOSBox. I am having a lot of fun with both of those.
https://github.com/robhagemans/pcbasic https://github.com/robhagemans/pcbasic
https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC