For those who don't know why GORILLA.BAS is so cool... Back in the day, computers were expensive and games weren't readily available. Sometimes a parent would buy a computer for word processing or spreadsheets or take kids to the office which also had business computers. Children were curious about the computers but there wasn't really anything fun to do with them besides banging on the keyboard...
...Until you found the BASIC dialect that came with MS-DOS, that is! GORILLA.BAS was bundled with DOS and was a fun little game you could play in those computers. It's not like you could access web games on the Internet - there was no Internet!
> Back in the day, computers were expensive and games weren't readily available.
You could get a PC for a thousand bucks back then, and shareware was a thing in 1990-91. Crystal Caves, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem were huge hits and there were tons of less popular games...not to mention copying commercial games from friends.
It was also a very educational experience to start messing with the code until you broke it - forcing you to figure out how to fix it, to get your game back.
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 Microsoft’s BASIC interpreters in the ’80s and early ’90s.
The best compliment I’ve received so far is from friends who grew up in the same era I did: when I fullscreen the browser, a few of them assumed it was a virtual machine running the real thing.
A QBasic port of the original BASIC-based DONKEY.BAS was one of the first programs I got running in it:
I’ve already sunk hundreds of hours into building out the fidelity of QuickBASIC (everything down to emulating memory access so you can simulate realistic PEEKing and POKEing), so I don’t have the sanity points left to tackle any other variants myself, but I’d love to see a GW-BASIC version.
For anyone unfamiliar with DONKEY.BAS: it’s notable for having been co-written by Bill Gates. More info on its history bere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DONKEY.BAS
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.
Someone gave my grandfather a Games BASICA floppy that had this and other games on it. But this copy had a few games that had been "modified". I remember in DONKEY.BAS, it would curse at you if you hit the donkey. "YOU STUPID SONOFABITCH". We thought it was hilarious. My grandfather was less pleased. He took it away from us when he found out.
It says something about what a thoughtful development environment these early BASICs were, that you could make a full simple little game like this in only 131 lines even though they're ostensibly far less powerful than modern languages. I'm not sure if you could even get an SDL window open and game loop running in 131 lines of (non-golfed) C.
Never mind how compact, beginner-friendly, and just plain fun they were to use. It's been said countless times but I'll say it again - we've lost something over the years.
raylib might do it in less lines. SDL is designed as a cross platform base layer to wrap in another framework not as something you should be using directly.
SDL has a lot of issues, and falls into the "only if you must" category. Still better than .NET or Java in many ways, as spacial audio is easy in the mixer. =3
It was really cool! The ease of getting started was definitely one of the selling points for the “home computers” of that era (GW-BASIC ran on IBM compatible PCs instead, but the appeal of BASIC was the same). Brevity was an important feature since a lot of people obtained programs by typing them over from a magazine or recording them from the radio. And of course, there was no such thing as auto-complete (let alone AI generation).
That being said, SDL isn't actually that bad either. A minimal example is about 40 lines of code [1], not counting comments and blank lines, but including lines with just a curly brace which you could easily remove if you were concerned about size. A slightly more serious implementation of Snake runs about 345 lines of code [2].
And to be fair, DONKEY.BAS is also cheating slightly on the line metric by stuffing lines full of statements, like for example:
A$=INKEY$:IF A$=CHR$(27) THEN 1298 ELSE POKE 106,0:IF LEN(A$)>0 THEN LINE (CX,CY)-(CX+28,CY+44),0,BF:CX=252-CX:PUT (CX,CY),CAR%,PRESET:SOUND 200,1
Python is the modern Basic replacement, and also has similar fundamental design trade-offs. VB6 was the peak of the OLE/Multimedia paradigm, and was functionally replaced by the web browser script sandbox.
> we've lost something over the years.
Indeed, Information Appliances were never general-purpose computers. Some people used to care about that sort of thing, and left civilization the GNU compilers as one of the most important intellectual artifacts of our generation. =3
Also, on reflection, I think the firefox window size is half of what I reported - I'm not sure what OSX does to its screenshots, but using SHIFT-CTRL-CMD-3, it's reporting about half that size. Not sure if that makes a difference to your changes (likely not).
This is what got me into programming. When I was a kid, I had a shitty 386 because my father got a computer second hand from a friend (we were poor). I was playing the game and then pressed a key and it took me to the basic editor. I was confused with what I saw and started changing things. I changed a number and the size of the explosion on the banana got bigger. My best friend at the time went to computer camp and explained to me that it was code. 30 years later I'm still programming.
tangential: I still remember how disappointed I was in PCs being used to a C64 (which was released in 1982) The quality of the games & sound effects was just not on the same level (C64 being much more advanced)
Ahhh I never saw donkey.bas, and only saw the Microsoft one. You know, when that company cared about being part of the industry, as opposed to being the entire industry, and really want to be 5 other industries to, as they do now.
Gorillas.bas (it's more or less like worms, except with only 1 gorilla per team)
Brings back memories of GORILLA.BAS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)
I was more of a Nibbles[0] person. I played it with other people on my XT-class laptop in high school.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibbles_(video_game)
I’ve got the music in my head just from seeing it written down. And the sound effect from gorrilla.
For those who don't know why GORILLA.BAS is so cool... Back in the day, computers were expensive and games weren't readily available. Sometimes a parent would buy a computer for word processing or spreadsheets or take kids to the office which also had business computers. Children were curious about the computers but there wasn't really anything fun to do with them besides banging on the keyboard...
...Until you found the BASIC dialect that came with MS-DOS, that is! GORILLA.BAS was bundled with DOS and was a fun little game you could play in those computers. It's not like you could access web games on the Internet - there was no Internet!
> Back in the day, computers were expensive and games weren't readily available.
You could get a PC for a thousand bucks back then, and shareware was a thing in 1990-91. Crystal Caves, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem were huge hits and there were tons of less popular games...not to mention copying commercial games from friends.
It was also a very educational experience to start messing with the code until you broke it - forcing you to figure out how to fix it, to get your game back.
GORILLA and NIBBLES!
We used to do quick tests of PC builds with GORILLA.BAS. It was later replaced by the 'Doom test'.
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 Microsoft’s BASIC interpreters in the ’80s and early ’90s.
The best compliment I’ve received so far is from friends who grew up in the same era I did: when I fullscreen the browser, a few of them assumed it was a virtual machine running the real thing.
A QBasic port of the original BASIC-based DONKEY.BAS was one of the first programs I got running in it:
https://mordenstar.com/share/qbasic-core-demos
At my first job, our entire order-entry and inventory management system was written in QBASIC. I wish I had the source to try it out with this.
I know someone who might, if we could figure out how to get it off a DOS 5.25" floppy!
This is fantastic! As one of those kids who spent the early 90s in QBasic, thank you!
aw neat I'd love to try doing this for its predecessor GWBASIC (my first programming language on the Tandy 1000EX)
You absolutely should!
I’ve already sunk hundreds of hours into building out the fidelity of QuickBASIC (everything down to emulating memory access so you can simulate realistic PEEKing and POKEing), so I don’t have the sanity points left to tackle any other variants myself, but I’d love to see a GW-BASIC version.
For anyone unfamiliar with DONKEY.BAS: it’s notable for having been co-written by Bill Gates. More info on its history bere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DONKEY.BAS
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
Clearly this needs to be replicated as GTA minigame.
My perceptron can play this game, I think
https://github.com/victorqribeiro/carGamePerceptron
I once heard the rumor that DONKEY.BAS was the last piece of code Bill Gates wrote himself at Microsoft. I wonder if it's true.
Someone gave my grandfather a Games BASICA floppy that had this and other games on it. But this copy had a few games that had been "modified". I remember in DONKEY.BAS, it would curse at you if you hit the donkey. "YOU STUPID SONOFABITCH". We thought it was hilarious. My grandfather was less pleased. He took it away from us when he found out.
It turned out that Dino run has deep roots
It says something about what a thoughtful development environment these early BASICs were, that you could make a full simple little game like this in only 131 lines even though they're ostensibly far less powerful than modern languages. I'm not sure if you could even get an SDL window open and game loop running in 131 lines of (non-golfed) C.
Never mind how compact, beginner-friendly, and just plain fun they were to use. It's been said countless times but I'll say it again - we've lost something over the years.
>I'm not sure if you could even get an SDL window open and game loop running in 131 lines of (non-golfed) C.
The basics (window, events, renderer) can be done in about 30 lines:
raylib might do it in less lines. SDL is designed as a cross platform base layer to wrap in another framework not as something you should be using directly.
I usually recommend the inexperienced do at least 1 project in godot:
https://godotengine.org/
Then port it to UE if they are interested in skill reuse for future projects:
https://www.unrealengine.com/
SDL has a lot of issues, and falls into the "only if you must" category. Still better than .NET or Java in many ways, as spacial audio is easy in the mixer. =3
It was really cool! The ease of getting started was definitely one of the selling points for the “home computers” of that era (GW-BASIC ran on IBM compatible PCs instead, but the appeal of BASIC was the same). Brevity was an important feature since a lot of people obtained programs by typing them over from a magazine or recording them from the radio. And of course, there was no such thing as auto-complete (let alone AI generation).
That being said, SDL isn't actually that bad either. A minimal example is about 40 lines of code [1], not counting comments and blank lines, but including lines with just a curly brace which you could easily remove if you were concerned about size. A slightly more serious implementation of Snake runs about 345 lines of code [2].
And to be fair, DONKEY.BAS is also cheating slightly on the line metric by stuffing lines full of statements, like for example:
1. https://examples.libsdl.org/SDL3/renderer/01-clear/ 2. https://examples.libsdl.org/SDL3/demo/01-snake/Python is the modern Basic replacement, and also has similar fundamental design trade-offs. VB6 was the peak of the OLE/Multimedia paradigm, and was functionally replaced by the web browser script sandbox.
> we've lost something over the years.
Indeed, Information Appliances were never general-purpose computers. Some people used to care about that sort of thing, and left civilization the GNU compilers as one of the most important intellectual artifacts of our generation. =3
On my machine, it is flickering like _crazy_, as if it's trying to shift back and forth between two resolutions.
OSX, Firefox, browser size 3326×2830 pixels. Only happens at or around that particular size - resizing the window fixes the issue.
maybe fixed. https://github.com/jkrauska/DONKEY.BAS/pull/4
Also, on reflection, I think the firefox window size is half of what I reported - I'm not sure what OSX does to its screenshots, but using SHIFT-CTRL-CMD-3, it's reporting about half that size. Not sure if that makes a difference to your changes (likely not).
Surprisingly fun!
my car keeps hitting the donkey when switching lanes even though I'm already well past it..
have you had anything to drink recently?
Related:
Happy 45th Birthday to the IBM PC and Model F/XT
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49280103
This is what got me into programming. When I was a kid, I had a shitty 386 because my father got a computer second hand from a friend (we were poor). I was playing the game and then pressed a key and it took me to the basic editor. I was confused with what I saw and started changing things. I changed a number and the size of the explosion on the banana got bigger. My best friend at the time went to computer camp and explained to me that it was code. 30 years later I'm still programming.
tangential: I still remember how disappointed I was in PCs being used to a C64 (which was released in 1982) The quality of the games & sound effects was just not on the same level (C64 being much more advanced)
Ahhh I never saw donkey.bas, and only saw the Microsoft one. You know, when that company cared about being part of the industry, as opposed to being the entire industry, and really want to be 5 other industries to, as they do now.
Gorillas.bas (it's more or less like worms, except with only 1 gorilla per team)
On the plus side: it was much prettier.
Donkey was for basica/gwbasic. Gorillas was for qbasic, like a decade later.