I was contacted recently by a man named Cory who has begun the honorable and arduous task of writing a GW-BASIC-compatible interpreter in Silverlight! He's also interested in preserving the language as it existed for both the purposes of historical archiving and for people to experience the fun of the platform in a pure way but without any emulators or complicated steps. Afterall, the beauty of BASIC was in its immediacy: turn on computer, write program, go!
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Yes, I've come upon a method for doing a sort of lighting effect in GW-BASIC's SCREEN 7 (EGA mode). It makes use of PUT/XOR and a custom PALETTE to allow sprites to be fully or partially "lit" and otherwise remain a shadow color (dark gray).
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There are, I'm finding, significant differences between GW-BASIC and FreeBASIC. For the first, you actually have to specify -lang deprecated in order to even support line numbers. So the compatibility goal of FreeBASIC being equivalent to QBasic is immediately suspect. What I'm looking for is a compiler to create modern operating system executables (Windows XP+, Ubuntu, OS X, etc.) with full support for GW-BASIC's language, or even QB.
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By default BASCOM does not support ON ERROR; apparently this is for optimization purposes. Thus if you compile your program and it contains anything that passes syntax but is not supported, it will crash at runtime. Thankfully, it will at least tell you that ON ERROR is ... well ... an error, but I initially thought that was just because it didn't know what it was at all.
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If you're looking for a copy of QBasic (which can run most GW-BASIC programs saved as ASCII) then head over to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/135315. Search the page for OLDDOS.EXE. That file expands into several "old DOS" utilities, including QBASIC.EXE!
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The BASCOM compiler specified by KindlyRat and others works for most GW-BASIC and BASICA programs, but in particular it doesn't support EGA which made me look to Q-Basic for making an EXE of SPACESC.BAS. QuickBASIC 4.5, release in 1988, has the capability to do this but there's some things you need to be aware of.
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I added a Games page with the first entry: Space Escape.
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GW-BASIC is a strongly-typed language but it favors single-precision floats and will automatically convert numeric values between floating-point and integer without requiring casting (as would be the case in C-style languages). Additionally there are three explicit functions for this purpose: FIX(), INT(), and CINT(). What are the differences between them, when would you use one over the others or not at all? Lastly, I'll discuss converting a string to an integer using VAL() in concert with the other techniques.
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It's nearly 4am and I'm waiting for YouTube to finish at least a rough processing pass on my first full demonstration video on Space Escape. I'd just like to verify that it works before passing out. In the meantime, here's some pictures of my workstation and notes.
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When I recently retook the helm of GW-BASIC programming, I found some things very restrictive and they forced me to invent relatively strange ways of solving simple flow problems. For instance, it wasn't until just this past week that I found you could cram more than one statement for the result of an IF/THEN!
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