Comment by vunderba

9 hours ago

Agreed! What’s this weird `SCREEN` command? Punch F1 and you get a complete breakdown of all the screen modes, color palettes, and their resolutions.

As I mentioned in another comment, I think if you didn’t grow up with it, you just underestimate how amazing QBASIC was as an IDE, a programming language, and perhaps most importantly as an educational tool. I mean, it even came with actual BASIC programs (GORILLA, NIBBLES, etc) right there that you could use to explore and tweak the values as you learned.

There’s no better way to learn how something works than to physically play with the actual values, change constants, change variables, and observe how that affects the behavior of the game.

2 comments

vunderba

qsera 7 hours ago

> you get a complete breakdown of all the screen modes, color palettes, and their resolutions.

If I remember correctly, there were even sample programs included in this documentation.

vunderba 6 hours ago

Yes! To my knowledge, I think almost every single keyword in the built-in help had a small example program at the bottom that you could type in.

For example GET/PUT had this one:

  SCREEN 1
  DIM Box%(1 TO 200)
  x1% = 0: x2% = 10: y1% = 0: y2% = 10
  LINE (x1%, y1%)-(x2%, y2%), 2, BF
  GET (x1%, y1%)-(x2%, y2%), Box%
  DO
      PUT (x1%, y1%), Box%, XOR
      x1% = RND * 300
      y1% = RND * 180
      PUT (x1%, y1%), Box%
  LOOP WHILE INKEY$ = ""