Hi,

I'm no expert, so I've only lightly dabbled.

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 6:10 PM, Abe Mishler <a...@mishlerlabs.com> wrote:
>
> I see it is back up now.

Like I said before, the compiler has been around (even heavily
developed) for 12 years! It's no toy but instead a mature tool at this
point.

> I had been doing some reading on the pros/cons of FreeBASIC vs QB64. Not 
> looking to start a flame war here,
> but I had decided to invest some time with FreeBASIC when the site went down. 
> I thought perhaps that was an
> early portent that I had picked the "wrong" compiler.

I've never used QB64 but have heard some stuff about it. For one, it
uses a C++ compiler as backend, no?

FreeBASIC is a fully native compiler (written in itself), albeit not
really optimizing, although it does also have an optional C (GCC)
output backend. The DOS version is based upon DJGPP's libc (and uses
DJGPP ports of GNU BinUtils), so it's compatible with anything (e.g.
libs) that already works with that.

fbhelp is really helpful (no pun intended) for looking up what's
supported. A lot of that is taken directly from the wiki. Also, the
DOS FAQ is quite helpful, too (thanks to DOS386).

> I see that Black Annex is probably written with QB64

But I (barely) disagree that the above is the "best QB game ever"
since, quite honestly, there were hundreds of really amazing (DOS
graphical) games written for vanilla QBasic interpreter. Well, at
least I always found them amazing. Even though I never worked on any,
they were always really really beyond what you would normally consider
appropriate for QB (so Gorillas is not the ultimate example I'd give,
there were many programs way way better than that ... although even
that is probably better than Donkey, heh, sorry Bill).

FYI, there's a truly brilliant genius named Joel who has written a lot
of cool stuff (even using QuickBASIC, e.g. NES emulator):

https://www.youtube.com/user/Bisqwit

> Does anyone have any experience or tips working with the DOS version of 
> FreeBASIC in FreeDOS that they'd like to share?
>
> If not, thanks for humoring me this far in the thread.

It has several supported "dialects", e.g. "fb" or "fblite" or "qb".
While the QB (and VBDOS) compatibility isn't 100%, it's better than
nothing. Of course, I think they more or less recommend all new code
be written in "improved" dialects like "fb", which offers a lot of
advantages. Though I'm not honestly sure if they ever finished with
the OOP support. (It's at least partially supported, though.)

Oh, you can also do inline asm (although that's not as easy as it
sounds with DPMI/pmode).

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