October 12, 2018
Twenty Year Anniversary Update
My oh my, does time fly! Pete's QB Site is now TWENTY years old... and it has been a full decade since the last update. (Yikes!)
Although I retired from updating this site and publishing QB Express in 2008, I've always intended to keep this site online forever as a resource. Pete's QB Site is here for the few diehards out there, who are still puttering away with BASIC almost two decades into the 21st century.
It's pretty quiet around here these days. Since the last update ten years ago, the QBasic community has all but scattered. It has a lot to do with computers no longer supporting QBasic the way they used to. The
Freebasic community grew, peaked, and then slowed down to a crawl. And
QB64 was launched and grew its own small but loyal following of nostalgic programmers. (QB64 seems to be where the most activity is these days in the QB world.)
What is new here? Well, the front page is the main update. I've turned it into a FAQ / "Landing Page" for people looking for information about QBasic in 2018. It will help direct new users to QB64 and Freebasic, as well as the handful of sites where the last vestiges and archives of the old Qmunity remain.
The other major update was to the
Zines archive. Since 2008, there were three major QB/FB zines that were published, and I have archived them here to make sure that they are preserved for posterity:
PCOPY! (2006-2008),
Back2Basic(2010-2012) and
Basic Gaming (2011-2012).
Additionally, I've restored an archive of
V Planet!, one of the most loved QB magazines and game review sites of all time. Also, Fling-master recently uploaded archives of
QB45.com and
QBRPGs.com.
Finally, I urge everyone to check out Lachie Dazdarian's
"A Love Letter To FreeBASIC" Competition (Oct 2018 - Jan 2019). This final competition from the
Freebasic Games Directory, has a $250 prize, and is "a chance for them to give one final farewell to FreeBASIC." The competition encourages programmers who were once active in the Freebasic scene to make one final FB game to say goodbye to this community and language that was so near and dear to us.
Posted by Pete |
October 19, 2008
Pete's QBasic Site celebrates TEN YEARS
Pete's QB Site is now a decade old!
On the rainy day of October 12, 1998, Pete's QBasic Site was born. I was thirteen years old, and never expected that ten years later this website would still exist, or that it would still be updated. But here I am, here you are, and Pete's QBasic Site is still alive and kickin'!
You can read an article I wrote about the past ten years of Pete's QB Site in
the latest issue of QB Express.
Also, this site was featured a few days ago on the front page of Reddit.com:
Share QBasic or it dies. A user posted a link to the
QB Philosophy section, where several visitors shared their answers to the question: "Why do you still program in QBasic?" It sent thousands visitors to this site, and spurred a great discussion where people shared some of their own QBasic memories.
Here's to another ten years! See you in 2018!
Posted by Pete |
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September 20, 2008
QB Express #29 Now Available
Published from the colorful mountains of Tibet,
QB Express #29 is here!
Although I'm in the middle of a 6-month trek around the world, I've found the time to put together another fantastic issue of QB Express. This is a very special issue: Not only is it the first time we've published from central Asia, it also celebrates the tenth anniversary of Pete's QB Site!
Articles this month include "Before Releasing Your Game" by Nalin Kanwar; "Mini Game of the Month" by Lachie Dazdarian; a look at the Y2K bug by Moneo; an interview with Lachie by HexDude; "Kiyotewolf on a Variety of Subjects" and more. The tutorials section includes a look at CGI and also Shuffling Algorithms by Samanddeanus; Part two of Wallyfblu's Window Procedure series; "Using 7x7x16 Tricks" by Kiyotewolf; and "The Pimpl Idiom" by stylin. Not to mention all the News Briefs, the Gallery, and letters sections that you've come to expect from QBE.
Read it all in
QB Express #29!
Posted by Pete |
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May 11, 2008
QB Express #28
It's May,
QB Express #28 is here!
This issue is full of wonderful things, like SEVEN tutorials and FIVE articles, all about QBasic and FreeBasic.
Pritchard teaches us about Game Camera Systems; Imortis Inglorian brings us "Bitflags and You"; Kiyote Wolf gives us the rundown on his method of "Amazing Cheap Texturemapping"; Lachie Dazdarian contemplates the eternal struggle of "The Game Developer versus the Programmer"; Mac gives us the skinny on the QBasic.com forums; notthecheatr starts his series on "Scripting Solutions for Games" with "Part I: Rolling your own interpreter"; and Pritchard talks to us "About Design."
It's a fun-filled, jam-packed issue. Read it all in
QB Express #28!
Posted by Pete |
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March 9, 2008
QB Express #27
The
March issue of QB Express is here!
This month, we've got a collection of fantastic articles and tutorials that pack quite a whallop -- so watch out! This may not be the biggest QB Express issue that's ever come out, but it certainly is no slouch... with SEVEN tutorials and THREE articles, as well as one of the biggest news briefs sections we've had in a long time.
MystikShadows reviews Dabooda's game Sokoban; h4tt3n gives us the second part of his series on Spring Simulation in Freebasic; Mentat brings us "Going Deep: Football and 3D Graphics"; Hezad teaches us how to generate awesome moving plasmas using the Electric Field equation; Wallyfblu teaches us about Window Procedure; Dean Menezes brings us "CGI and QBasic"; and Kiyote Wolf helps us reinvent the Commodore Wedge. And as always, we've got all the latest news from around the QB and FB community, and much, much more.
Read it while it's hot --
QB Express #27 truly delivers a knock-out punch!
Posted by Pete |
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February 9, 2008
QB Express #26
The
February issue of QB Express is now available!
It's been over three months since the last issue, but it definitely was worth the wait. This issue features one of our largest News Brief segments ever, as well as NINE articles/tutorials, covering topics such as "The Art of Rounding"; creating your own Worms-like scrolling engine; using FMOD to play sound in your Freebasic programs; Database indexing; programming spring physics in FB; and functions with local variables.
QB Express is definitely getting back on track, and I think this issue will prove that.
You can read it all in
QB Express #26!
Posted by Pete |
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December 28, 2007
Freebasic Forum Opens
The last few months, there has been a
lot of debate over whether this site is a dedicated exclusively to QBasic/QuickBasic, or whether we cover Freebasic as well.
If you haven't noticed, QB Express has been covering Freebasic ever since the day it was first released, and now more than half of our content is consistently Freebasic-related! I have also made (slow) progress toward adding new Freebasic sections to Pete's QB Site. The way I see it,
Freebasic is almost like the next natural version of QuickBasic -- only it wasn't released by Microsoft.
FreeBasic was created by members of the QBasic community, and almost all of its users are former QB programmers. From the beginning, a major goal was to keep FreeBasic as compatible with QuickBasic as possible, while enhancing its functionality and abilities. This is the important distinction between FB and other dialects of BASIC you'll find online: FB was designed by QB programmers to be the next logical step in the QBasic lineage. That's why I have decided to expand my site to include Freebasic in addition to QBasic.
Tonight, I created a new forum for
FreeBasic Questions & Answers, where you are free to ask questions about and discuss FB without fear that the "QB establishment" will hound you. Likewise, I expect the FB fans out there to stop bullying QB programmers by recommending that they switch over to FB. From now on, let's just try to help each other and get along!
Posted by Pete |
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October 31, 2007
QB Express #25
Happy Halloween! The
October Issue of QB Express is now available.
This special Halloween edition has very little to do with pumpkins or ghosts, but is bursting through the seams with what you all really crave: QuickBasic and Freebasic! There are EIGHT tutorials this month, covering everything from floormapping and sphere mapping, to recursion, to peek and poke, to particle engines, to acceleration. We've also got some cool articles on User Oriented Programming, accessibility and file names, and "The multi-faceted nature of games."
All this and more in
QB Express #25. Check it out!
Posted by Pete |
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