I’m working on a 100% faithful adaptation of both QBasic and QuickBasic 4.5 that runs entirely in the browser running on a virtual CPU and hardware abstraction layer. It’s a love letter to everyone who learned to program on Microsoft’s BASIC interpreters in the ’80s and early ’90s. The whole project is fully open source.
The best compliment I’ve received so far is from friends who grew up in the same era I did: when I fullscreen the browser, a few of them assumed it was a virtual machine running the real thing.
I’ve tried hard to capture the spirit of what made QBasic great: built-in IDE help, an interactive, line-by-line interpretive environment, no compilation step, and a fast feedback loop. So far, every program you write in the simulator can be taken to an old 386 and will run exactly the same.
It started out as a bit of a mad scientist experiment, but I’ve already put close to a hundred hours into it.
Silly video demo (take a PEEK - see what I did there?)
https://mordenstar.com/share/qbasic-core-demos
The best compliment I’ve received so far is from friends who grew up in the same era I did: when I fullscreen the browser, a few of them assumed it was a virtual machine running the real thing.
I’ve tried hard to capture the spirit of what made QBasic great: built-in IDE help, an interactive, line-by-line interpretive environment, no compilation step, and a fast feedback loop. So far, every program you write in the simulator can be taken to an old 386 and will run exactly the same.
It started out as a bit of a mad scientist experiment, but I’ve already put close to a hundred hours into it.
Silly video demo (take a PEEK - see what I did there?)
https://mordenstar.com/share/qbasic-core-demos