DONKEY.BAS would have been relegated to the dustbin of time except that Bill Gates (along with Neil Konzen) is the developer. Thankfully he moved on from games because this one falls short, even for 1981. I had a 5-1/4" disk labelled "donkey.bas" wasting away on my shelf for many years. I recall testing it on and off again...for maybe only 20 minutes total over the 10 years I had a floppy drive. I preferred Hard Hat Mack and Flightmare back in the early 80s.
Since I've recently (re)discovered the source code, I'll spend an hour or so documenting it -- it's more fun than playing it!
Here's the source walkthrough, which took a bit longer than I ever spent playing this game.
(Original Source)
(Code Walkthrough) (Variable List)
DONKEY.BAS is supposedly the first game written for the IBM PC. It demonstrates Microsoft BASIC interpreter licensed to IBM (BASICA-variant) for the original PC. There isn't much to say about the code beyond the walkthrough. The two most interesting parts are:
- Hand drawing the donkey and car using the pen-like DRAW command
- Animating the center line using a pixel overlay every 3rd frame