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  • Hacker News
  • I once heard the rumor that DONKEY.BAS was the last piece of code Bill Gates wrote himself at Microsoft. I wonder if it's true.
    by sedatk
  • Someone gave my grandfather a Games BASICA floppy that had this and other games on it. But this copy had a few games that had been "modified". I remember in DONKEY.BAS, it would curse at you if you hit the donkey. "YOU STUPID SONOFABITCH". We thought it was hilarious. My grandfather was less pleased. He took it away from us when he found out.
    by friarpuck
  • Related:

    Happy 45th Birthday to the IBM PC and Model F/XT

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49280103

    by ChrisArchitect
  • The game theory is all wrong, this is a cooperative game, either they both win or both lose. I don't see how the Donkey getting hit by a car should be classified as "Donkey wins"
    by marcuskaz
  • Inspired by the 45th anniversary of the IBM PC, I got my slopmachine cracking on a port of DONKEY.BAS to work in a browser. Pretty happy with the result. As a young person I remember being fascinated that you could make a game like this with so little code.
    by jkrauska
  • For anyone unfamiliar with DONKEY.BAS: it’s notable for having been co-written by Bill Gates. More info on its history bere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DONKEY.BAS
    by jamesdhutton
  • Brings back memories of GORILLA.BAS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(video_game)
    by nfriend
  • Nice job. The sound effects are a bit too advanced because early IBM computers shipped with pretty simple, magnetically driven dynamic speakers.

    On a related note, I’ve actually spent the last four months working on a 100% faithful adaptation of both QBasic and QuickBasic 4.5 that runs entirely in the browser 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 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.

    A QBasic port of the original BASIC-based DONKEY.BAS was one of the first programs I got running in it:

    https://mordenstar.com/share/qbasic-core-demos

    by vunderba

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Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory · Birbla