13 Dec
2005
13 Dec
'05
9:18 a.m.
----- Original Message ----
From: "Teo Zenios" <teoz at neo.rr.com>
Subject: Re: Old MS-DOS & WIN Software
----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Stevens" <chenmel at earthlink.net>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 12:30 AM
Subject: Re: Old MS-DOS & WIN Software
Something rather surreal in some regards, but which
could be very
useful for quick hackish projects, is Visual Basic for MS-DOS.
It's not something Microsoft promoted for very long, but it was
out there and some of us grabbed a copy.
And yes, I do have the boxed Professional version. And what may
have been the only third-party book teaching how to code in it.
It's sort of cool- a completely text-mode version of Visual Basic
that you can develop code with on with a machine that only has an
MDA card. Like watching mpegs rendered to 'ASCII graphics'
(somebody actually coded that, btw.) It works almost identically
to Visual Basic 3.0 for Windows.
http://www.qbcafe.net/english/index.html?dl_pages/compiler/index.html~qbc_m…
This link has a few libraries for QuickBasic and Visual Basic for DOS (and
if you dig around it has the VBDOS binaries). Visual Basic for DOS can do
real graphics just like QuickBasic can, the interface is just DOS based I
believe.
---------------------Reply----------------
Most third-party MDA cards were Hercules-compatible and could display
better graphics than CGA (Mono, of course, but much cheaper than EGA or VGA,
and surprisingly, Windows didn't look too bad without colour).
And there was a driver to use the internal speaker for sound if you couldn't
afford a sound card...
mike