this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Firmware. (seemel.ink)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

QBasic came with NIBBLES.BAS, a snake game using text-mode characters as "pixels". Specifically it faked a 80x50 "pixel" grid using the standard 80x25 text screen where each 8-bit (=1 byte) text character made up two monochrome pixels using ▄ or ▀ or █ or an empty space.

I assume the name derived from the fact that, in a way, one pixel was "using half a byte", i. e. a nibble.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Such good memories of learning to code as a kid in QBasic, I remember NIBBLES.BAS.

I was totally spoiled as my dad had the professional paid version which had an incredible IDE for the time and things like user defined types and structs that I later found out weren't usually part of BASIC. It also had a ton of fancy graphics modes, double buffering, and even a sprite library. I loved playing around making crappy games.