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Comment by wk_end | Hacker News Reader

It says something about what a thoughtful development environment these early BASICs were, that you could make a full simple little game like this in only 131 lines even though they're ostensibly far less powerful than modern languages. I'm not sure if you could even get an SDL window open and game loop running in 131 lines of (non-golfed) C.

Never mind how compact, beginner-friendly, and just plain fun they were to use. It's been said countless times but I'll say it again - we've lost something over the years.

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It was really cool! The ease of getting started was definitely one of the selling points for the “home computers” of that era (GW-BASIC ran on IBM compatible PCs instead, but the appeal of BASIC was the same). Brevity was an important feature since a lot of people obtained programs by typing them over from a magazine or recording them from the radio. And of course, there was no such thing as auto-complete (let alone AI generation).

That being said, SDL isn't actually that bad either. A minimal example is about 40 lines of code [1], not counting comments and blank lines, but including lines with just a curly brace which you could easily remove if you were concerned about size. A slightly more serious implementation of Snake runs about 345 lines of code [2].

And to be fair, DONKEY.BAS is also cheating slightly on the line metric by stuffing lines full of statements, like for example:

    A$=INKEY$:IF A$=CHR$(27) THEN 1298 ELSE POKE 106,0:IF LEN(A$)>0 THEN LINE (CX,CY)-(CX+28,CY+44),0,BF:CX=252-CX:PUT (CX,CY),CAR%,PRESET:SOUND 200,1

1. https://examples.libsdl.org/SDL3/renderer/01-clear/ 2. https://examples.libsdl.org/SDL3/demo/01-snake/

SDL is incredibly terrible based on that example - I imagine it would be about five lines of qbasic?

Yeah for the rendering a smooth set of RGB shifting colors using SIN you could do it in a few lines of QBASIC.

The only thing is that since the SDL example uses a 640x480 resolution, which corresponds to SCREEN 12, and in QBASIC it only gives you access to 16 indexed colors at once.

So you have to "cheat" by redefining a single entry (like index 1) throughout the loop with calculated RGB using the PALETTE command. It's basically the equivalent of palette color cycling used in some older games.

>I'm not sure if you could even get an SDL window open and game loop running in 131 lines of (non-golfed) C.

The basics (window, events, renderer) can be done in about 30 lines:

    #include <SDL3/SDL.h>
    #include <SDL3/SDL_main.h>

    static SDL_Window* window;
    static SDL_Renderer* renderer;

    int main(int argc, char* argv) {
        SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO|SDL_INIT_AUDIO|SDL_INIT_GAMEPAD);
        SDL_CreateWindowAndRenderer("test", 640, 480, SDL_WINDOW_RESIZABLE, &window, &renderer);
        SDL_Event event;
    
        while(true) {
            while(SDL_PollEvent(&event) != 0) {
                if (event.type == SDL_EVENT_QUIT) {
                    goto ENDGAME;
                }
                //events go here
            }
            
            // update here
            SDL_SetRenderDrawColor(renderer,0,0,0,255);
            SDL_RenderClear(renderer);

            // render here
            SDL_RenderPresent(renderer);

        }

        ENDGAME:
        SDL_DestroyRenderer(renderer);
        SDL_DestroyWindow(window);
        SDL_Quit();
    }

I don't think you could get all of donkey.bas done in 131 lines, though. SDL3 does ship with an embedded debug font but that seems like cheating. You probably couldn't replicate the drawing code easily, it would probably need to be faked with images, and you'd need a font atlas for the text.

Back in the days you would buy printed magazines that contained full basic source code of programs and games and type them on your own text editor. I was a bit too young to do that but I remember watching my older brother just do that and then play games (after finding the typing errors for a while).

What we lost is simplicity across the stack.

I learned to program with BASIC. It was awful. I didn’t know how awful it was until many years later. So I don’t miss the language. But something I miss is how easy it was to learn what your machine was doing.

The DOS boot and config involved only two files: CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, that was it. Most programs were self-contained, so you could copy the directory to a floppy disk and run them on another machine. If you broke something, copy the files again and restart; that was it… I “broke” config and programs many times, and it was a good way to learn.

Python is the modern Basic replacement, and also has similar fundamental design trade-offs. VB6 was the peak of the OLE/Multimedia paradigm, and was functionally replaced by the web browser script sandbox.

> we've lost something over the years.

Indeed, Information Appliances were never general-purpose computers. Some people used to care about that sort of thing, and left civilization the GNU compilers as one of the most important intellectual artifacts of our generation. =3

131 lines and about 10% of them are the title/copyright banner. Genuinely impressive in it's terseness

Nearly a quarter of it is checking for necessary prerequisites, too.

raylib might do it in less lines. SDL is designed as a cross platform base layer to wrap in another framework not as something you should be using directly.

I usually recommend the inexperienced do at least 1 project in godot:

https://godotengine.org/

Then port it to UE if they are interested in skill reuse for future projects:

https://www.unrealengine.com/

SDL has a lot of issues, and falls into the "only if you must" category. Still better than .NET or Java in many ways, as spacial audio is easy in the mixer. =3

BASIC was higher level (or anyway, more batteries-included) than C. You could probably do this game in 131 lines of javascript straightforwardly.

BASIC was the whole OS in 8 bit home computers.

Other than that, either you would have machine code via DATA statement, be lucky that there was support for entering Assembly like on the BBC, or have the opportunity to actually get a proper assembler.

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