DONKEY.BAS
Instead of talking about Drivey all the time, I thought it might be nice to mention another interesting driving simulator. Please cast your mind back to 1981, and imagine you were one of those lucky enough to own an IBM PC with CGA quality video…
Ah yes, good ol’ Donkey… who doesn’t remember this timeless QuickBasic Classic…? Anybody…?
Actually, I don’t remember it at all, as it was just a sample program bundled with early DOS versions, and written by none other than [ wait for it... wait for it...] Bill Gates himself!
In 2001 he used it in a presentation to demonstrate how far VisualBasic has come [ You can read his speech here ]. To further illustrate the point, MS created a new version of Donkey to showcase all the great new XML-WebService-Dot-NET whizbangery they’re always ramming down our throats to make our lives easier.
Somewhat amusingly, I [haven't tried that hard but] can’t even get the damn thing to work properly, even with the latest .NET 1.1 Framework installed.
Isn’t that ironic? Well, isn’t it…?
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View the original Donkey source code © 1981 IBM - downloaded from somewhere or other
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Download the original playable Donkey - an EXE built using good ol’ QuickBasic 4.5




This game is awesome. I think bill gates should make a sequal named “Lama”
Sexual Bob -
“bill gates should make a sequal named ‘Lama’”
http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/
Also, Mark – I gave Drivey a try, and it looks great. Something about it is very charming. Poking keys to see what they’d do was fun, too :)
Hey dude, the VB.NET Donkey is written using beta 2 of the .NET framework so it won’t work on version 1.1 if you want to get it to work download and install the .NET Framework version 2.0 from here :
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7ABD8C8F-287E-4C7E-9A4A-A4ECFF40FC8E&displaylang=en
Hello bill you are great:)