Early QuickBasic Games

I found a copy of some of my early programming on an old drive — the source code I thought had been lost. I learned qBasic after finding the dev tool in my Windows system folder. I found a help file that got me started with the basics. I began with demos and then moved on to some simple games.

I wanted more from the language and found out that you can connect to the display output directly for things like drawing and you can even communicate with the mouse to take input to provide point and click events.

Biker Game

I started with the biker game. It was a simple Tron clone where you had to avoid the walls and the other player. It was set up with two players on the keyboard and when a player crashed I animated an explosion.

Play Biker

Towers of Hanoi

Then I think I created the Towers of Hanoi as a class project. I was taking a computer programming class in High School and they were also teaching in QBasic. It was a simple disk game initially. But I had been playing with drawing using the shape and line commands available in QBasic. I wanted to create a 3D-ish version that animated the disks moving up and down. I don't have a working copy of this version but do have a demo of what it was going to look like, where I was testing and perfecting the effect.

Play Towers of Hanoi

Somewhat Classic Hangman

Finally I created a Hangman game. This was stretching the language to its limits. I wanted to have some animation and instead of just using line drawings with built in commands I planned on using BMP sprite files that I created in Windows Paint. I looked up how to read in the BMP and drew it on the screen Later capturing what colors the pixels in their respective places were to store in memory. It also included some file based database storage for the phrases and categories

Play Hangman