The Maze, Now Building with FreeBasic

I spent a little time last week finally working the kinks out of the old DOS game I wrote in college, The Maze. I won't bother making a downloadable binary, since the code for the game is now hosted here on this site. You can download a tarball of the code or git clone if you prefer. It should build on any Linux system with FreeBasic installed.

It was actually compiling previously, since thanks to the lang=qb setting FreeBasic can be very nearly 100% compatible with QuickBasic, but I was having issues figuring out why my original timing techniques weren't working. All the action was happening way too fast to be playable. In hindsight I think the issue might have been with the variable types I was using (not enough precision perhaps). Regardless, this led me to rework the entire timing system, so that now it relies on the Sleep command rather than the Timer variable... this is a better approach for a modern OS anyway, because Sleep releases the CPU for other tasks while a tight timing loop that keeps checking Timer does not.

Another part of getting it playable was adjusting how keyboard polling is done. QB made you rely on the InKey$ variable which read from the keyboard buffer. The problem with the keyboard buffer is that it only fills as fast as the keyboard repeat rate setting, which is not ideal for a game. Fortunately FreeBasic adds the ability to get the scan codes of any currently pressed keys using the MultiKey function. Importantly, since this is a FB-only function which would not normally be available in lang=qb mode, I had to prefix it with two underscores.

Another big change was the mouse routine for the editor. The original game used some machine code that I must have found somewhere on the internet back in college, but now FreeBasic has mouse support built in. Fortunately it works in a very similar way as that old machine code, and all I had to do was switch out some function & variable names (again with the two underscores) and it started working again.

I haven't truly ported it to FreeBasic as the title suggests, since that would be a pretty large undertaking and not worth doing for a silly little project like this... way too much technical debt. As I went along I couldn't help but constantly see things that I would do completely differently now. But my goal was just to get it building and playable again under a modern OS. (I did not yet take the time to actually finish the game's content. But that's why I included a level editor.)

All that said, as I learned a bit about FreeBasic, I did start to think that with its blend of modern features & libraries, combined with the classic programming style & ease of use of Basic, it could perhaps be a good language to use for making a retro-styled modern game. It would be pretty easy to make an engine from the basics using the ANSI character set (which is what I did with The Maze), and then gradually add features like tile-based graphics and sound.