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Comment by vunderba | Hacker News Reader

If you are craving a BASIC fix, I highly recommend getting a DOS emulator like DosBos-X and just installing a copy of Quickbasic 4.5 (which has a compiler among other niceties over the original Microsoft QBASIC). You can easily find it on the Internet Archive.

There are modern variants like QB64, but personally I find that BASIC really loses a lot of its appeal/flavor when you move from an interpretative language to a compiled one.

https://dosbox-x.com

I made this a while ago and it ran beautifully in DosBox on my Mac:

https://specularrealms.com/q-basic

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I prefer GW-BASIC 1.0, as open sourced by Microsoft a few years ago, but with some changes to make it possible to build it easily yourself:

https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC

Also do a pip3 install pcbasic to get this great reimplementation of BASICA/GW-BASIC done in python for modern systems: http://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/

Or this which is lighter:

http://www.moria.de/~michael/bas/

Thanks for the pointer to pcbasic! I experienced nostalgia from doing

    play "cdefgab>c<bagfedc"

and have it simply work.

> Quickbasic 4.5 (which has a compiler among other niceties over the original Microsoft QBASIC)

QuickBasic was the original, with QBASIC being a cut down version of it bundled with DOS.

If anyone is interested, I just wrote a TinyBasic implementation:

https://github.com/danieltuveson/dbi

I was afraid 'dbi' would clash with a binary on my machine (related to DBI), but it's fine.

BTW, on Basic, I had MISSION.BAS for MBASIC.COM under CP/M.

https://termbin.com/w7oe

Is there any public Basic to run it? I tried bas, blassic, bwbasic, yours, and I had no luck.

Sorry, but I'm not sure which dialect of BASIC this is - wish I could be more helpful here. TinyBASIC is a very minimal implementation (no arrays, functions, nor loops) so it definitely won't be able to run this program.

This:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBASIC

Thank you for the dosbox-x suggestion. I am running Ubuntu on a newer laptop and did not have any luck getting Age of Empires to work in a virtual machine because of issues with DirectX on modern hardware. The game would render so slowly as to be unplayable.

I installed dosbox-x out of curiosity, then saw you could load Windows 9x on top of it. I chose the recommended Win98SE. It took a bit of tweaking to get the drivers loaded for 256 color display and the sound card, but I was just able to play the game. Because DosBox emulates the machine (I think this is it, anyway.), there are no issues with DirectX rendering. I was able to play through the Ascent of Egypt learning campaign for the first time since 2009 or so.

Maybe next I'll try to loading up a version of BASIC. I'd have to rewind back to 2000 or so for using Visual Basic in high school computer lab.

Thanks again, getting to play AoE without having to buy an XP-era laptop, was a real treat.

Nice! I think my favorite part of the original age of empires was the weird Latin sounding simlish of the voices (Pleribus!)

It'll be interesting if you can get the original VB to run. Fun fact there was actually a visual basic for dos which would let you build TUIs out of extended ASCII.

I saw that and was quite pleased with the idea of it all working nicely in say,80x50 text mode, that I proceeded to write a similar set of subroutines.

I ended up with a pretty nice subset.

Could draw a window with fields, pop a number of them up on top of that window, if desired.

Used that to write a small pile of DOS programs which computed various manufacturing related values used in sheet metal work.

There is no reason to lose anything, hence why many BASIC still do support both ways of working.

I bet many are unaware of many dynamism is still present in VB.NET, pity BASIC is no longer a darling language at Microsoft headquarters, and gets the bench on Sunday games.

Bas will run straight:

http://www.moria.de/~michael/bas/

There's no need to run QB 4.5 and a full VM.

I was craving a BasicA fix, so rather than run the ROM extractor on an IBM, I found the extraction program with them extracted. No 43-line mode like qbasic... :(.

Or FreeBASIC (it has QB compatibility mode). Works fine on Windows/Linux/DOS. No macOS port, unfortunately.

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