

GORILLA.BAS - janogonzalez
http://hem.passagen.se/hedsen/prg/games/gorilla.bas

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planckscnst
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.

~~~
atomicdog
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.

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

~~~
technomancy
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.

~~~
phaedrus
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!

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kristopher
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>

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garethsprice
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.

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fennecfoxen
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.)

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groovy2shoes
You might like Steve Hanov's qb.js, complete with Nibbles pre-loaded!

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

~~~
mobileman
Atwood law in full swing!!!' awesome

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radiowave
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>

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

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

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gildas
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

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

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stagas
Here <http://ge.tt/9aOwYN9?c>

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jiggy2011
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.

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

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atomicdog
Upvoted the moment I saw the title :)

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skeptical
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?

~~~
abrown28
nostalgia?

