Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory

You used to be able to do surprising things with those old speakers using a timer interrupt: on an IBM XT it was possible to get 8kHz quality out of it, enough to make 4-channel MOD playback sound about as good as hearing it over a phone.

But your more typical use case was to play a single tone for some significant fraction of a second.

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!

And for the slightly younger folks who have more memories of Visual Basic than QBasic, check out GAMBAS: https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html

Amazing. This is nostalgia heroin for me.

How far does the HAL go? Screen 12 and 13, and writing directly to VRAM? WAIT for vsync? Call absolute for mouse usage?

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)

Do non-magnetically driven speakers exist?

Nibbles!

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)

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!

GORILLA and NIBBLES!

GORILLA.BAS got me into programming decades ago. I made an (admittedly partially vibe coded) homage this year: https://gameswithtony.com/gorillas/

We used to do quick tests of PC builds with GORILLA.BAS. It was later replaced by the 'Doom test'.

2nd, the wikipedia article has some fun stuff in it

> I got my slopmachine cracking on a port

For 131 lines?

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

Donkey is also a collective noun for the donkeys and so the army that is the donkey wins.

That has all the hall marks of urban legend, but why let the truth get in the way of a great story.

I have said it for a very long time, Gates wasn't innovative in technology but he absolutely innovated in bringing the most ruthless business practices into software.

As a kid I modified DONKEY.BAS for my younger brother who wanted to play as a donkey avoiding cars. It was a clumsy modification, I didn't account for the differing size of the pseudo-sprites, but it made him happy.

I learned most of the best cursing I've ever done from my grandfather. He took pride in teaching his grandkids to curse.

He was involved in setting up the radar systems at Pearl Harbor, much good that did.

Modifying those games were the first times I ever touched code! There was one that existed somewhere between DOS 2.0 and 3.2 that simply asked your name, then asked how the hell you got that name. It was maybe half a dozen lines, but easy enough to modify output and learn a bit about variables.

That video should totally have this as the soundtrack beneath it:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3qRXDGApNU

have you had anything to drink recently?

I haven’t looked at the code but the collision detection was buggy even back in the day. You have to switch lanes while there is nothing or a donkey in front of you. If the donkey is in the other lane it registers a hit even if it looks like you passed it

Edit: line 1750 is where it does a simple collision check and yep looks like it registers a collision without checking you’re past the donkey or not

maybe fixed. https://github.com/jkrauska/DONKEY.BAS/pull/4

Back in the days you would buy printed magazines that contained full basic source code of programs and games and type them on your own text editor. I was a bit too young to do that but I remember watching my older brother just do that and then play games (after finding the typing errors for a while).

What we lost is simplicity across the stack.

I learned to program with BASIC. It was awful. I didn’t know how awful it was until many years later. So I don’t miss the language. But something I miss is how easy it was to learn what your machine was doing.

The DOS boot and config involved only two files: CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, that was it. Most programs were self-contained, so you could copy the directory to a floppy disk and run them on another machine. If you broke something, copy the files again and restart; that was it… I “broke” config and programs many times, and it was a good way to learn.

BASIC was higher level (or anyway, more batteries-included) than C. You could probably do this game in 131 lines of javascript straightforwardly.

131 lines and about 10% of them are the title/copyright banner. Genuinely impressive in it's terseness

>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:

    #include <SDL3/SDL.h>
    #include <SDL3/SDL_main.h>

    static SDL_Window* window;
    static SDL_Renderer* renderer;

    int main(int argc, char* argv) {
        SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO|SDL_INIT_AUDIO|SDL_INIT_GAMEPAD);
        SDL_CreateWindowAndRenderer("test", 640, 480, SDL_WINDOW_RESIZABLE, &window, &renderer);
        SDL_Event event;
    
        while(true) {
            while(SDL_PollEvent(&event) != 0) {
                if (event.type == SDL_EVENT_QUIT) {
                    goto ENDGAME;
                }
                //events go here
            }
            
            // update here
            SDL_SetRenderDrawColor(renderer,0,0,0,255);
            SDL_RenderClear(renderer);

            // render here
            SDL_RenderPresent(renderer);

        }

        ENDGAME:
        SDL_DestroyRenderer(renderer);
        SDL_DestroyWindow(window);
        SDL_Quit();
    }

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

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.

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

A dithered, meme-y photo of Bill Gates appears if you win 10 times. That probably wasn't in the original, I'm guessing?

WTF 386 was for me a sci-fi like device I wouldnt dare think about having when I was a kid. I had a very nice 8086 I cherished, with VGA video no less ! (Yes driving a vga card with a 8086 was slow..

Donkey was for basica/gwbasic. Gorillas was for qbasic, like a decade later.