ATK v2.3 uploaded (under Utilities)

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abionnnn

ATK v2.3 uploaded (under Utilities)

Post by abionnnn »

I thought a few (any?) people would be interested in the ATK the Assembler ToolKit. Contains tutorials by myself and others, generally directed towards people wanting to learn assembler.

More interestingly, it contains an implementation of an inline assembler. This initially was a quick 5 hour job when I was bored in a holiday overseas back in 1999. I found an old dodgy computer in Syria and coded up an inline assembler for QB. (it's amazing what you can achieve when you are almost bored to death). Also contained various utilities ranging from a make utility for QLBs with an example (highly commented) mouse library, to a COM to BAS converter. Don't ask about the last one, just ... don't ... ask. =)

I'm thinking that the original archive for this was lost (a certian individual might have a copy), this thing got pulled together from various backups. So it could be a bit dodgy... e.g. a few half written tutorials. ;) Doesn't excuse the bud spilling, nor grammar the. But in retrospect, they haven't improved that much!

I hope it's a useful addition to your download page, Pete.

Great work on that btw! You are breathing fresh life into the dormant (but not dead, no, never dead) QB world. I've been away for quite a while persuing my university degree. (too long a story) I was actually reminded of QB by flicking through the Agilent/HP 34970A user manual, where I hit upon some examples of controlling modern scientific GPIB equipment in QuickBASIC!! Maybe I'll OCR scan those, since these manuals are probably hard to come. The unit itself can't be more than 3-4 years old, so that alone should indicate that QB is far from dead.

-abionnnn
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Pete
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Post by Pete »

Thanks a lot for uploading this package!

I took a peek, and it's got a lot of great stuff on it. Definitely worth a download if you do your own ASM coding for QB (instead of just using prepackaged libraries)... Nice tutorials.

QB is definitely dying, but it's got quite a bit left to go. As long as the big QB sites are still around, there will still be a QB community.
abionnnn
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Post by abionnnn »

Thank you for your kind comments =)

(warning: rant)
I think there are three main reasons why there's been an abrupt decay in the size/activity of the qb community.

The first one is an analogy of the "baby boomer" concept. Lots of people entered the QB community during the time frame of 1993-1997. These people tend to leave together as they have less and less time, leaving a lot of vacancies to be filled. There are some people who don't give up though, and they generally carry the scene during it's hard times.

The second one's probably has more to do with my nostagilic tendancies but anyway: The "online atmosphere" has also changed significantly, and "crappy" (without any insulting connetations) websites just don't seem to cut it. Without this threshold, a critical mass of websites whose authors read each other's material and try to better themselves will never appear. At one point in time, geocities decided to clear away all the websites which don't respond to an email they sent out in 31 days. I suspect that is why much of the QB history has disappeared. It's a real shame, I know some people find it embarrasing to leave up their old stuff but how can you ever know how far you made it if you forget where you started from?

Lastly, the fact that Microsoft has decided to pretty much ditch DOS doesn't make it easy for new people to take over for the old people who are leaving. Unlike the other two though, this can actually be fixed by making a clone of QB.

In the end I suspect that QB will become a bit like the Amiga. A great platform, with a few die hard people programming for it, laughing at the mere mortals who would rather do something else while coding things people in the scene during it's living times would never have imagined =)

-abionnnn

P.S. I kept my old "crappy" one alive, complete with the shocking spelling/structure and terrible jokes. Hrmmm, though I did try to hide it ... you seemed to find the main page, argh! darn you! ;)
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Post by Digital Shadow »

Good stuff...
People laugh at me because I'm different, I laugh because there all the same... Soooo, if were all laughing, I fail to see the problem
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