GORILLA.BAS | Hacker News Reader

GORILLA.BAS

hem.passagen.se

31 pointsjanogonzalez23 comments

Yes! I played this as a kid. Until then, I didn't realize such things were possible with QBasic. From that point, I wanted to make my own game. I remember looking at the source code and thinking I'd never be able to figure out how a program that long works.

It's funny how trivial it looks now.

Did you know Ken Silverman actually prototyped algorithms for the Build engine in QBasic before porting them over to C? He must have found it easier to work in.

Hmm. Nibbles.bas and gorillas.bas are probably the main reason why I'm a programmer today.

Some of my fondest middle school memories are of hacking NIBBLES.BAS to add support for dropping mines. Nothing like the addition of weapons to spice up a game.

Me too. I added a 3rd snake that was black and controlled by the computer. Also made it so the levels wrapped so if you went off one edge you appeared on the other side. The unintended consequence was you could get into the scoreboard and eat your own score numbers!

"Don't call yourself a programmer." ;)

Yeah. I read that. But I'm mainly into academia. So I'm not really referring to my professional life when I call my self a programmer, though I do program in my professional life as well. Just like I call my self I write when referring to my hobby/side-job as an online journalist.

Related: A fun story about DONKEY.BAS [1] told by Andy Hertzfeld exists where he reminisces about comparing an 8088 with the Macintosh project and how they were disappointed at the lack of ingenuity.

[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Donkey.txt

Wonder how many people here got interested in development because of spending time poring over GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS? I know it was my first exposure to source code, and the ability to create your own game.

Sad that MacOS/Windows no longer includes any simple source code for curious explorers to discover.

Gorilla.bas is okay, but if you're going to load up nibbles.bas please fix the bug where the number permanently disappears if the Pause dialog covers it. Thanks.

(Also, the block-drawing character tricks in Nibbles were rather neat little affairs.)

You might like Steve Hanov's qb.js, complete with Nibbles pre-loaded!

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=92

Atwood law in full swing!!!' awesome

If you just want to go ahead and play it, Gorilla is re-implemented in flash ready to run in the browser at:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/Moly/gorillas-bas

If there was ever a game that needed an HTML5 recreation...

I think QBasic.exe is smaller than adobe.com's favicon

I didn't remember that you could do graceful degradation with qbasic :p

    'This is a clever way to pick the best graphics mode available
    ON ERROR GOTO ScreenModeError
    Mode = 9
    SCREEN Mode

Does anyone have a copy of the original QBASIC NIBBLES.BAS source?

Here http://ge.tt/9aOwYN9?c

Oh this brings back memories of my 386!

Probably one of the first open source programs I used , before I even knew what open source meant.

Unfortunately, it does not work on qbasic emulator at http://repl.it/

Upvoted the moment I saw the title :)

Genuinely curious about the reason why this is oh HN's front page. It's a gorilla.bas, how is this news? Or am I missing some detail here?

nostalgia?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com