The Sinclair QL Forum

An article I wrote for my blog recently, about getting QBASIC up and running on modern 64-bit PCs, so that we can tap into the relatively large wealth of QBASIC programs out there to turn some of them into QL SuperBASIC programs, as I did recently with the Dunric's 8K Adventure.

https://dilwyn2.wordpress.com/2023/04/06/qbasic/

Interesting, very interesting. Thanks Dilwyn, an enjoyable, but brief, read in the middle of debugging some assembly code. For the Arduino though, not the QL at the moment. However, the 5 minutes I took to read it, gave my subconscious time to work out the cause of my Assembly problem and come up with a solution!

Cheers,
Norm.

Hi,

so not QBASIC for compiling SBASIC from QD...

Derek_Stewart wrote: Thu Apr 06, 2023 6:36 pm Hi,

so not QBASIC for compiling SBASIC from QD...

No, I'll leave that to clever people like you, Derek

dilwyn wrote: Thu Apr 06, 2023 7:03 pm

Derek_Stewart wrote: Thu Apr 06, 2023 6:36 pm Hi,

so not QBASIC for compiling SBASIC from QD...

No, I'll leave that to clever people like you, Derek

Thank you for the complement, I do not think I am clever....

HI Dilwyn,

I read in the blog posting that you can not install QBASIC on Windows 10 x64, have you looked at the Microsoft Store, there is a QBASIC app that can be installed.

Ah, but have you read the reviews? 1.2 stars out of 5 and reviews like

"No graphics modes work and all graphics command give an error - this should be removed from the Microsoft Store it does not work and is not a legit version of QBasic."

So I hope it doesn't come with malware etc (as some online reviews claim).
I had my suspicions when it came up with Japanese titles etc. And it's called Quick Basic in some places, QBASIC in another - Microsoft were quite specific as to which name was used for each version.
Surprised Microsoft allows it in their store. Unless it's a locally licensed version or something.
Plenty of other versions of BASIC out there for Windows on PCs of course - it was just a bit of a retro thing for me to be able to run the original, but mainly installed so I could port M$ BASIC programs to QL.
There is of course something called QB64 out there at https://qb64.com/ - I haven't tried that to know how close to the original it is. Anyway, for the purpose I had in mind the original QBASIC with DOSBox does the trick for me well enough.

I tried QB64 a few years back and recall it was pretty faithful to the original. But I'm not a QB expert by any means, I just tried QB64 with some examples from a QB book I have, and iirc all worked exactly as expected.

Sparrowhawk wrote: Fri Apr 07, 2023 3:48 pm I tried QB64 a few years back and recall it was pretty faithful to the original. But I'm not a QB expert by any means, I just tried QB64 with some examples from a QB book I have, and iirc all worked exactly as expected.

Would be interesting to see ifg QB64 can work with qdos-gcc!

XorA wrote: Fri Apr 07, 2023 7:39 pm

Sparrowhawk wrote: Fri Apr 07, 2023 3:48 pm I tried QB64 a few years back and recall it was pretty faithful to the original. But I'm not a QB expert by any means, I just tried QB64 with some examples from a QB book I have, and iirc all worked exactly as expected.

Would be interesting to see ifg QB64 can work with qdos-gcc!

So there's XorA's next project
If anyone was wondering what we're on about, "QB64 gets compiled automatically into machine code – allowing exceptional performance, easy distribution, and the ability to link with external C and C++ programming libaries." Sort of off topic to what wanted to do with QBASIC I suppose, though.