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

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

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)

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)

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

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

have you had anything to drink recently?

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

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.

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();
    }

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.

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

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