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Well, is this the end?

Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2018 6:45 am
by angros47
Ten years ago this site celebrated the fact that it was ten years old. Now, that announcement is still the most recent one: in the last ten years, nothing new has been done. So, I'd say that petesqbsite could be considered officially abandoned, and just an historical archive.

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2018 11:50 am
by burger2227
Qbasic will not even run full screen graphics on newer 32 or 64 bit machines. That was the end!

This site can still be used for many programmers using QB64 who need ideas or help.

Thank Pete for keeping it going unlike the many other QB sites long gone!

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2018 3:48 pm
by angros47
burger2227 wrote:This site can still be used for many programmers using QB64 who need ideas or help.
Can. But it isn't.

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Sat May 05, 2018 6:15 pm
by CantaNope
It is used for that. Otherwise, why would I be here?

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Wed May 30, 2018 6:31 pm
by Pete
You are correct that this website is just an archive at this point. Hardly anyone still programs in QBasic, ever since Windows fully moved on from DOS and QBasic wasn't properly supported.

But this website still does get a fair amount of traffic, all things considered.

The big tutorials archive is still the most used part of the site... lots of beginning programmers around the world still start on QB, believe it or not.

I plan to keep the site up forever, but will probably never do any major updates on it ever again.

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Thu May 31, 2018 3:31 pm
by burger2227
Speaking of the tutorials and such, we should have a link on the Board to the main site.

Perhaps up in the Pete's site area up top...

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2020 9:50 am
by RETROQB45
While ZX, NES and C64 have huge communities of fans, why can't QB have one?

Yes, if we treat it like a "real" programming tool, it's kinda... no-way :(
But, if we think of it as a part of retrocomputing universe, why not?

It's like an old DOS game or Arduino, and a lot of people have warm memories with it.

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2020 10:54 am
by burger2227
Windows 10 32 bit allowed QB to work for a while then quit allowing it.

That is why many now use QB64, but its site has been hard to link to at times.

I edited the QB64 WIKI which also has old QB code that may work.

M$ also blocked serial and parallel ports which I dealt with in my QB tutorial that can be downloaded from my signature below...

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Wed Jun 10, 2020 3:00 pm
by buddpaul
Pete's lives forever!

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Wed Jun 10, 2020 3:00 pm
by buddpaul
Pete's lives forever!

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2020 2:59 am
by Erik
I don't even own a recent Windows computer and I still use QB for some of my hobby stuff. For regular QB programming I use my 486 or my IBM XT. (same 486 I used back in the 90s). When writing on my main computer (Ubuntu) I just use DOSBox. DOSbox works great with QB. You can full screen, set the CPU speed, etc. I haven't had any issues with it even running old QB programs from back in the day. Probably much easier than trying to run QB natively in the current versions of Windows.

Does QB64 have a decent sized community? I never got into it so I don't know. I guess there's also the issue with the number of BASIC versions/types around throughout the years splitting things up. You have C64, Atari, MS, and many others splitting the community. I actually just started learning BatariBasic for Atari 2600 recently and it's a whole different beast than QB even if the syntax has some similarities.

Probably another issue is that even Visual Basic is on the decline. After it moved to VB.net, it changed from a more similar syntax to a re-skinned C# language (And even then, people are using it less and less).

Anyway, I've been floating around since the QB hay day and it's crazy to see how empty it is these days. Hopefully we'll get more people popping back for nostalgia reasons!

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Thu Aug 06, 2020 9:46 pm
by nikomaru
Could be, could be. Kids these days are into that "3D" graphics programming with Unity or UDK (which is a great product, btw). I run Linux and use DosBox for my QB fix as well. I found a good copy of QB7.1 PDL so I have ALL the libraries, ability to make EXE and DLL, etc. It's great. I made my kid a "hangman" style word guessing game, but made flower petals receive incorrect letters instead of a stick figure hanged to death. The executable runs on Dosbox fine; haven't tried on the W10 machine yet. He's getting a Kano soon, and I'm thinking he could learn QBasic as well as Scratch on that. Too bad it runs W10S.
I'm just rambling. Sorry. Yeah, I found Pete's some years ago and found it a great resource when the builtin QBH files didn't answer a programmatic question. I'm glad it's still up and running.
If you haven't yet checked the QB64 site, you should. The people there are enthusiastic for programming, but QB64 uses 4.5 and I find it limiting due to some necessary issues it has in order to run on 64-bit machines, including Win. I'll stick with 7.1 in DB, thanks. And thanks again to Pete for keeping this whole site up.

Its NOT the END!

Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 11:34 am
by mikefromca
Heck, in high school I was literally the best Quick Basic programmer.

And now, I'm using it more than ever due to my future goal, running a lazertag center.

Yes, I made custom hardware with an 8052-based microcontroller that people think is old, and meant to be abandoned but electronic shops today STILL sell that microcontroller! and THAT is even more old-school than Quick Basic.

Nice thing about that micro is that it has an on-board uart and despite its uart only having a 1-byte buffer where as the one in the PC has a 14 or 16-byte ring buffer, it communicates with my code in Qbasic flawlessly. and get a load of this... I have no problem with 56Kbps communication and I didn't even use assembly at the Qbasic end to achieve this. I referred to the old beyondlogic.org pages on how to set the serial speed beyond 9.6Kbps. Its stored on 3rd party servers because beyondlogic changed their site since. but here's a copy:

http://wearcam.org/seatsale/programs/ww ... erial1.htm

Now to add to the mix, I made my code as an external CGI application to rubbermallet's webserver software (also written in QuickBasic). See:

http://rubbermallet.org/software/webserv.html

And I also used Dos TCP utilities which the author updated just last year to see if tcpip works which it does!

http://www.brutman.com/mTCP/

So basically what I did is turn a portable computer into a DOS web server that loads content but the content is based on what my custom microcontroller hardware spits out to the server, so in effect, the computer is the proxy server and the mini hardware is the server itself. I'm going to reply with pictures and steps people can take if they want to pull off the same kind of thing themselves.

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 12:07 pm
by mikefromca
Ok, so I'm going to show 5 screenshots of my PC in action with a quick basic program. I guess this interface allows me to upload one file at a time, so I'll have to make another post with the remaining screenshots as a zip ile

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 12:10 pm
by mikefromca
heres 2 more. then 2 more after that and thats it

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2021 12:13 pm
by mikefromca
ok I put the pics here. this is the last of them. I didn't bother with the zip file because this forum told me it was too large.

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:53 pm
by Erik
That is super cool!!!

I noticed on Rubber Mallet's website, they said the web server version only allows one connection at a time, but I guess that's not an issue because you only have the one system talking to it or was that updated as well?

Re: Well, is this the end?

Posted: Fri Feb 26, 2021 12:27 am
by mikefromca
Right now I'm working on a multi-connection system that can execute EXE's and I'm about to post a question reflecting it thats QB Based.