People of a certain age (no comment from this Lifehacker editor) are likely to remember BASIC as the first programming language they learned. Australian developer Lance E McDonald has such fond memories of the language, he’s actively using QBASIC to build a game right now.
Mark over at Kotaku has the full story of McDonald’s inspiring/interpid/insane (take your pick) quest to launch his game ‘Black Annex’. Hit the post for the full story.
Comments
4 responses to “‘I Still Use BASIC When I Have A Choice’”
… Are you sure it’s actually qbasic, and not freebasic or similar?
Hell, qbasic apps 99% likely will not even be able to compile for, let alone run on, modern systems, where the identical language with newer tools (freebasic) would, and provides support for some modern tools like OpenGL for graphics..
If he is really using qbasic, he isn’t a nostalgic user, he’s an idiot and should not be giving anyone anything that could be remotely mistaken as advice.
He’s using QB64, which translates BASIC into C++ as an intermediate step and then compiles it into binary. The way the media has been reporting this has been terrible – QBASIC is an interpreter, not a language, and QB64 gives access to a whole lot of modern things (64 bit data types, sound and graphics integration, etc) that never existed in QBASIC.
We recently had one of our regular visitors at GameDev.Net finish a 2 year project to create and publish a new game for Commodore 64 — it’s even released on cartridge! — and he shared a lot of details in 100 different developer journal (blog) entries along the way.
You can see the final entry here:
http://www.gamedev.net/blog/949/entry-2256406-a-c64-game-final-step/
…or the entire archive (newest entries listed first) here:
http://www.gamedev.net/blog/949-new-old-things/
It was pretty interesting following his efforts and seeing some of the more unusual difficulties faced along the way. It’s also pretty interesting to know there’s still a market for new games on these older consoles.
Definitely not the most productive thing to do, but certainly an interesting personal challenge. Good luck to Lance!
Oh my dear god! Those were the books that I used to START coding! Cherished memories… hours poking at a keyboard… then having everything die because of a $ or a , or a : in the wong place….. then came assembler!