4 ms·

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

by tdicola 14y ago

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.

laumars 14y ago
He's already using SDL. Plus, QBASIC64 isn't a DOS environment. In fact, when you look at the specs for QBASIC64 then it's a little less impressive than first made out. It also makes me wander why he didn't just learn VB anyway (as the libraries in QBASIC64 would have required additional learning anyway). Even VB classic would have made more sense. Anyhow, this at least reminds the language elitists that a language is only as powerful as the developer who's wielding it.
- jfim 14y ago
  It's still impressive, though as you say, much less impressive than it seems at first glance. Doing anything useful in QBasic was such a major pain; from what I recall, to use the mouse(which wasn't supported), you needed to write an assembly procedure byte by byte, do a CALL ABSOLUTE to jump into that procedure and re-read the cursor position from memory.
  - D9u 14y ago
    Most of the "good" games of the 1990's were written in assembler, as were many of the "Demoscene" graphics demonstrations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
- nollidge 14y ago
  QB64 appears to compile to various platforms, while VB does not. Also, VB is pretty GUI and event-centric. QBasic is a pretty good local maximum of being quite expressive while still being a strictly procedural language.
  - laumars 14y ago
    > QB64 appears to compile to various platforms, while VB does not. VB.NET does compile to other platforms via the Mono framework. In fact Mono is actually available for more platforms than QB64 is. Classic VB is Windows only AFAIK though I've had a 100% success rate with VB under WINE. But suggesting VB6 was pretty dumb on my part anyway; aside scripting variants (eg VBA), it's a pretty much a dead language. > Also, VB is pretty GUI and event-centric. QBasic is a pretty good local maximum of being quite expressive while still being a strictly procedural language. VB.NET supports procedural CLI apps. But if you could equally write an OpenGL / DirectX game procedurally if you wanted (events are there to be used, but you don't have to create event handlers). However I don't really see the point in wanting to avoid using events; he's using a mouse, so it makes sense to have a mouse click event. The code would be a lot cleaner and the interface more responsive than having a looped procedure checking for mouse button states (believe me, I've had to do both - and the one thing I don't miss from writing DOS GUIs in Pascal was having to create a psudo-event wrapper to handle input devices).

by tdicola 14y ago

laumars 14y ago

He's already using SDL. Plus, QBASIC64 isn't a DOS environment. In fact, when you look at the specs for QBASIC64 then it's a little less impressive than first made out. It also makes me wander why he didn't just learn VB anyway (as the libraries in QBASIC64 would have required additional learning anyway). Even VB classic would have made more sense. Anyhow, this at least reminds the language elitists that a language is only as powerful as the developer who's wielding it.

jfim 14y ago
It's still impressive, though as you say, much less impressive than it seems at first glance. Doing anything useful in QBasic was such a major pain; from what I recall, to use the mouse(which wasn't supported), you needed to write an assembly procedure byte by byte, do a CALL ABSOLUTE to jump into that procedure and re-read the cursor position from memory.
- D9u 14y ago
  Most of the "good" games of the 1990's were written in assembler, as were many of the "Demoscene" graphics demonstrations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
nollidge 14y ago
QB64 appears to compile to various platforms, while VB does not. Also, VB is pretty GUI and event-centric. QBasic is a pretty good local maximum of being quite expressive while still being a strictly procedural language.
- laumars 14y ago
  > QB64 appears to compile to various platforms, while VB does not. VB.NET does compile to other platforms via the Mono framework. In fact Mono is actually available for more platforms than QB64 is. Classic VB is Windows only AFAIK though I've had a 100% success rate with VB under WINE. But suggesting VB6 was pretty dumb on my part anyway; aside scripting variants (eg VBA), it's a pretty much a dead language. > Also, VB is pretty GUI and event-centric. QBasic is a pretty good local maximum of being quite expressive while still being a strictly procedural language. VB.NET supports procedural CLI apps. But if you could equally write an OpenGL / DirectX game procedurally if you wanted (events are there to be used, but you don't have to create event handlers). However I don't really see the point in wanting to avoid using events; he's using a mouse, so it makes sense to have a mouse click event. The code would be a lot cleaner and the interface more responsive than having a looped procedure checking for mouse button states (believe me, I've had to do both - and the one thing I don't miss from writing DOS GUIs in Pascal was having to create a psudo-event wrapper to handle input devices).