qbasic - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: abdullahseba
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2014, 09:28:51 am
content: is qbasic & quickbasic the same

author: 128er
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2014, 09:48:31 am
content: Wikipedia says - No ...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasicQuote

author: noah_fakelastnamelike_bob
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2014, 12:44:51 pm
content: hi uh for all i know from my books about programing. no i have no clue never looked into it just remember reading it.

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2014, 01:25:19 pm
content: Why are you interested? It's obsolete. There are much better programming languages available now.You can't run it natively on modern Windows versions, unless you use an emulator such as DOSBox or virtual box.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2014, 03:56:08 pm
content: Geez, I used to write that, back when all I had was an 8086 machine!I still have the, 500k or so of plaintext .BAS floating around I think.Tim

author: G0HZU
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2014, 05:37:16 pm
content: I still (regularly) use a suite of RF design tools I initially wrote in BASIC and then used MS QuickBasic to allow me to convert/use them as an exe on a DOS machine when I bought my first PC in 1990.I run them in a DOS box and they help with things like impedance matching, synthesiser design, filter design etc etc.

author: FrankenPC
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 20, 2014, 08:47:46 pm
content: Quote from: G0HZU on April 20, 2014, 05:37:16 pmHave you checked this out? QB64:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QB64

author: KerryW
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2014, 11:08:05 pm
content: Qbasic is an interpreter, QuickBasic is a compiler.

author: GK
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 21, 2014, 01:14:32 am
content: This brings back memories. Every time the teacher walked out of the room.............

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 21, 2014, 10:16:44 am
content: Quote from: KerryW on April 20, 2014, 11:08:05 pmQuickBasic was both a compiler and interpreter.From what I remember the code generation was horrible, with a compiled EXE not running that much faster than the interpreter.

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 21, 2014, 10:30:47 am
content: Quote from: Hero999 on April 21, 2014, 10:16:44 amWrong.QuickBasic 4.5 produced excellent speed compiled code, quite competitive with the Borland & Microsoft C and Pascal compilers of the day for most general uses, in some instances even faster.Nobody used Quickbasic as an interpreter. It had an interpreter command line built in, but it's only use was some immediate debugging.IIRC you could get a library for QB4.5 called PDQ (Pretty Darn Quick) that replaced some of the built-in libraries for faster more speed optimised versions.BASIC PDS 7.1 (QB4.5 was the cut down version without the professional multitasking features) produced faster executable than the competing C and Pascal compilers of the day.I know because I benchmarked these things at the time and continually shot down many a myth that QuickBasic produced slow code.

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 21, 2014, 01:59:15 pm
content: Wow, C and Pascal must've been horrid. I've traced function calls in QB before -- woe unto you if you accidentally perform floating point calculations, it does something like eight FAR CALLs and 20 floating point instructions for a single operation. And each instruction took 200-500 clock cycles, and that's if you had a math co (8087).Tim

author: Zero999
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 21, 2014, 03:53:13 pm
content: Quote from: FrankenPC on April 20, 2014, 08:47:46 pmQB64 does look good. I've dabbled a bit with FreeBASIC which is only partly QB compatible.Quote from: T3sl4co1l on April 21, 2014, 01:59:15 pmI agree, that's why loads of QB programmers use MS-DOS debug assembler to put binary code into their programs when they need a bit more speed. Remember call absolute?

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2014, 06:14:41 am
content: Quote from: Hero999 on April 21, 2014, 03:53:13 pmRemember? I was beast at ABSOLUTE.I remember the ~33 byte mouse routine (INT33 with register-to-stack wrapper). Also made my own, I think... though I don't remember what I changed, if anything. Also a keyboard interrupt for maintained keypresses. Better pray your program doesn't get an interpreter error in the middle! Made my own routines for certain graphics functions -- I wrote a raycaster engine (think Wolfenstein 3D ca. 1992) which ran, IIRC, about 20 FPS with SINGLEs, 35 FPS with INTEGERs (fixed point), and a comfortable 60 FPS+ with the assembly routines (also fixed point).I also later ported much of it to assembly (since I didn't bother with memory allocation, it was a 200kB executable, about 8k of which was code -- from a ~30k commented .asm file!), which ran only a measly 400 FPS on my 1GHz processor at the time.The assembly version (with a byte-per-pixel to EGA converter routine) took about ten seconds per frame on my 8086 computer.(Oh and yes, that machine has proper 128k EGA w00t!)That, and a few other projects, made an interesting spring. Wanna say it was 2007 or so. Taught myself x86 for reals (I had merely dabbled -- DEBUG and such -- before then), fairly fluent in about two months. That was also before I had any "qualified" learning (my first class on that was AVR assembly the following year).Tim

author: digsys
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 22, 2014, 06:43:29 am
content: I wrote a lot of code in all those flavours, and still use many of the proggies today. Spent a fortune on 3rd party add-onmachine code libraries, often even writing my own in MASM. A lot of the code "talked" directly to hardware, awesome speeds.Then, I migrated to VB6 and still prefer it over the NET crap.

author: abdullahseba
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2014, 09:14:12 am
content: Quote from: Hero999 on April 20, 2014, 01:25:19 pmit is easy to program the parallel port using qbasic & I am not much good at programing