Miscellany

About

Here is a grab-bag of other BASIC programs I’ve written. Most of them are just exercises from QBasic By Example, and may of the others are just aborted attempts at an idea, but there are a few guessing games and other random bits of nonsense that, for some reason or another, I thought was worth perusing.

Some programs of note:

2_IN_1.BAS — This was a combination of two guessing games I made after learning about the LOCATE and COLOR statement, along with how to display ASCII line characters. The games are trivial, but I loved coming up with the colourful line art.

CASH$.BAS — At the time, many of the shops my parents visited had tills which were actually small computers, complete with keyboard and tiny CRTs. They were running some point-of-sale software that used a lot of colourful ASCII art. This was my attempt at making a toy version of that. I should also say that this was during a phase where I added a simulated DOS prompt at the start of each program, as if the program was launched from the DOS terminal and had some initialisation routine it had to run through before starting. This was just for fun, and many of the games I was playing at the time had a similar launch experience, so I thought it would be cool if all my programs did too.

LEPE.BAS — This looked to be a small editor that could be use to enter in music sequences that were played back by the PLAY statement. I can’t even remember making this, but looking at it now, it may have been inspired by one of the exercises in QBasic By Example that played back one of Mozart’s sonata (TUNE1.BAS was the same program but with one of my own tunes).

MENU.BAS — This one was actually made by my dad, when I asked him how I could build a menu that used the arrow buttons and highlighted the selected item. For I while I remember copying and pasting this code whenever I needed such a menu (the spelling mistakes were my own).

SCRNSAV.BAS — This was actually taken from a listing printed in a magazine, although I can’t remember which one. But it was the one that informed me about QBX, with a builtin compiler to make EXE files, which I though was awesome (I was using the old QBasic at the time, which was just the interpreter).

SQUARE1.BAS — This was a simulation of a dot-matrix marque. I think I was inspired by the ones that were installed in some of the suburban trains at the time.

I’m sure there are others but these are the ones I’ve found so far.