Pete's QBASIC Site

I wish I could learn how to sound more supportive when I type because I'm really happy to see new games being programmed in QuickBASIC; especially ones that are actually complete and worth playing like yours (I got a fairly large collection of programs and a good chunk of them, while charming, are u...

I really think the actors' collision box should be thinner and maybe a little shorter too.

Some jumps are deceptive, others are really tricky to pull off: there's one in particular in a bonus round in which I expected the spring to bring me over the ledge to the left, but it didn't (I had to jump from the block directly below) and my first game over was on level 14 because I didn't realiz...

Thank you very much!

Thanks! Yes, the short delay before the column is placed was in the original game. I got some things close enough (holding the down arrow key increases the score like it does on the Genesis, but there's a one point difference because I didn't pay attention to the delay before cementing the column,) ...

It's a clone of Sega's 1990 Columns in QuickBASIC. It has both the "original" and "flash" game modes, and supports joystick. It also features all the blocks from the Game Gear version. It's been tested under DOSBox (around 1500 cycles) and on a 18 years old laptop (Intel Celeron ...

Damn, that's really cool!

I wrote two articles if anyone's interested: the first one covers basic tricks with GET and PUT (such as sprites,) and the other explains how to build a fairly flexible system to animate every object and character in your game without going through tedious condition blocks or redundant code. I'm joi...

Hi there! It's cool to see you're still working on your clock. If I could suggest a bigger optimization, it would be to remove the several calls to COS(), SIN() and the two multiplications done every update for each hand because it's fairly costly. It's not a problem for a simple clock program but c...

Great! I'm fairly confident a binary search is fast enough to return the index in the array, but you're right about the ordered list: it takes time... I gave a try with Quick sort, and even though it's 4x faster than Shell sort, it also takes 2x the time to parse an already sorted list. Storing the ...

Nice! Can I make three suggestions? They are trivial to implement, except for the last one. In GetWord$, use the file size to obtain the number of words in the dictionary rather than using a hard-coded value (so words can be added or removed without modifying the program.) Allow the player to give u...

Hi there! I'm a little bit of an autist when it comes to numbers, so I'll use the TIMER function to extract the hour in number form rather than convert the TIME$ string (TIMER returns the number of seconds elapsed since midnight:) EDIT: as it turns out, TIMER doesn't return the number of seconds ela...

I need the opinion of someone who knows assembly and the obscure intricacies of messing with pointers in an interrupt because I'm an ASM noob. I used to use Milo Sedlacek's MULTIKEY assembly code to replace the keyboard interrupt service routine because up until recently, it never failed to deliver....

I've been looking for Hackman (the first one) by James Robert Osborne (aka Wisdomdude.) I'm certain it exists since his old website mentions the game, but I've been unable to locate any copy of it on the Internet. Most QB repositories still provide a link to either Hackman 2 or 3 (or both,) but neve...

I wrote an answer, but I'm dumb and tired so I'm revising it. Short answer to your problem: you don't have to search all folders and keep track of the whole directory tree starting from the root IF you parse your folders linearly (one scope at the time.) That means you only need to keep track of fol...

QBasic doesn't support namespaces, which is what I think you're trying to do with "maindata." I'm afraid you'll have to create a set of shared variables instead (see this topic for shared variables.) It's dirty but there's no other way that I'm aware of: DIM SHARED mdStoreName AS STRING * ...

Way back when, we used to simply store assembly code in hexadecimal text-form in DATA statements... I'd replace the target string with an INTEGER array and use POKE to fill it faster. This would remove the need for the CHR$() and would also avoid resizing strings on-the-fly, which is much slower tha...

Fairly certain it's working as intended. Fixed-length strings will always return the same length, regardless of their content. DIM v AS STRING * 50 v = "Fifty" PRINT "*";STRING$(50, "-");"*" PRINT "*";v;"*" Consider the following: DECLARE F...

That's probably more an ASM question than a QB question. Anyway, a while back Hans Lunsing wrote a replacement for Call InterruptX in assembly so QBasic 1.1 could also support interrupts. The code is available right here . I don't know much about assembly but it should be possible to retrieve the in...

Okay, I think I removed the crash on exit bug again. Let's see how long that lasts. Version .4 fixes a few things (like changes not warranting a confirmation prompt, and some crashes caused by saving/loading empty documents) and includes folder browsing for file load/save. Also, the interface librar...