0xd00ds and 0xd00dets!

I invite you all to a grand Occasion!

The Unvailing of my Very First QBASIC program!

I did this in class (while waiting for the teacher to get me my next course) on the DOS 6.22 system I installed

I wanted to do a pong clone but I didn't have enough time after figuring out the little bit of the language shown above

I'm sure You all say it's lame.. then show me your first QBASIC programs!

For some reason I'm having difficulties uploading, or else I'd link to it...

The first program I wrote was almost 10 years ago. (Time flies!!!) I was 12-13 years old, somewhere in that range. Anyway, it was a monopoly game written in QBASIC. I didn't have any programming resources, just the QBASIC help file. No internet. Didn't know anyone who could program. It was frustrating.

I actually started it in GW-BASIC, so there are a bunch of line numbers. Then I realised QBASIC came with the PC, and I was ecstatic. Especially once I figured out what SUBs and FUNCTIONs were. I can remember figuring out what an array was for the first time. Too bad I had already gone too far with:

IF player$ = a$ THEN dola = dola + 100
IF player$ = b$ THEN dolb = dolb + 100

Which looking back, I suppose if you give both players the same name that bad things (TM) would happen, heh.

I wrote my first 320x200x256 rpg in qbasic.. had a world editor and everything done... then i saw djgpp/allegro and erased it I'm dumb!

I wrote the first version of Rocket Duel with QBasic. (Do you think the current RD is hard to play? This is twice as hard. A long game is one that lasts more than a couple of seconds, but we still had a lot of fun with it, my sister and I.) If anyone is interested: http://trumgottist.com/tmp/raket.bas Adjust the "FOR Delay = 1 TO 10000" things in Spela and Spela2 to fit your computer's speed.

But at the very first encounter, I didn't know what QBasic was, nor had I any idea what programming was. I found Nibbles on my parent's computers hard drive and messed with it until I understood what it was doing.

The first attempt I did was to add a third player. I searched for every occurence of "Sammy" and "Jake" (the names for the snakes) and where I found them together, I added a third name. I didn't work, of course. But eventually I understood what sammy(i) meant... The QBasic help file was very good!

Add a defint A-Z. (Usually makes code run faster.) And if you add the interger symbol after all your ints, it will run even faster. To check keypressed you can use Select Case. I forget how to type it though.. I think

SELECT CASE (K1$)
    CASE IS CHR$(65)
        xinc = xinc + 1    
    CASE IS CHR$(66)
        yinc = yinc + 1      
END SELECT

I'm not sure why it goes faster. I think it has to do with checking a table of what type your variables are, and if you have the sign, it doesn't need to.

An endless loop can be broken with CTRL-C or CTRL-BREAK.

if you wanted to access a variable in a sub that was decalred in the main program, use

SUB Something()

shared var1,var2

Does the PC speaker beep if you keep a key held down?

use k1$ = inkey$ at the top before you check it's value, then after those lines, set it to k1$ = "" will keep it empty and stop the beeps. (IIRC)

Check out my sweet QBASIC game:
[url http://benny.kramekweb.com/quandary]

It's not pure qbasic though. It uses the directqb(the allegro of qbasic) library which is written in assembly

So what was the mortality rate in your prog?

I made a happy face move across the screen one time on a friends computer in 1997 or something. It would be to hard to do anything interesting without using some additional libs like wolfman pointed out.

My very first BASIC (of some sort) program was similar to that, and written on our Atari 2000

10 PRINT "You Suck"
20 GOTO 10

heh. coo. You gotta admit though, that for my first 2 hours EVER using/learning QBASIC, that that wasn't too bad