I remember copying logo programs from a whiteboard into an Apple II as a grade schooler. It's a great "instant results" way to introduce kids to programming, and it lends itself to exploration in a way that today's copycats ($10/mo iPad subscriptions and visio diagrams to make a character walk around) don't.
In this particular case, FreeBasic was written in Visual BASIC for DOS 1.0 until it could compile itself. But you're right that some of the original syntax it's added (e.g. C-style pointers) takes it a bit away from what BASIC was.
All nostalgia aside, TIL that superfans reverse engineered "Space Cadet" from binary code [1] the same way they did Mario 64 [2]. Not only that, they've ported the result to use SDL and execute in the browser under Emscripten. A super-impressive technical accomplishment with a beautifully tangible result, wow!
My favorite bit - the reverse engineering process seems to have fixed the 64-bit bug Raymond Chen blogged about [3]
> I did not find it, decompiled game worked in x64 mode on the first try.
> It was either lost in decompilation or introduced in x64 port/not present in x86 build.
> Based on public description of the bug (no ball collision), I guess that the bug was in TEdgeManager::TestGridBox
Thanks for reporting! What's your browser? I've only tested with a recent Firefox and Chrome on Windows. I know iOS doesn't work but I don't have a means to debug it.
https://parkertomatoes.github.io/v86/?type=com&content=aACgB...