5 ms·

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 PC

by sltkr 1mo ago

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

NetMageSCW 1mo ago
SDL is incredibly terrible based on that example - I imagine it would be about five lines of qbasic?
- vunderba 1mo ago
  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.

by sltkr 1mo ago

NetMageSCW 1mo ago

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

vunderba 1mo ago
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.