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It's because it's not written in QBasic. It's written in a variant of QBasic called QB64 [1] - a spiritual successor to Microsoft's QBasic intended to run on modern 64-bit machines.

I went over the BAS source the last time this was posted a few weeks back and it has a lot of keywords that are specific to QB64 so unfortunately you can't run this on a true DOS machine (or DosBox).

[1] https://qb64.com

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Worked second time for me (on Mint)

The first time it barfed was because there was a space in the filename, and the QB64 editor didn't handle it. Running on the command line, with quotes around the name, was flawless.

However, it should be playable on Linux or OSX, both of which are (reportedly) supported by QB64.

I did give it a try, but no luck; qb64 seems to only run the code by compiling it via C++, and that failed on my system. (And I don't have the determination to try to find out why.)

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