QBasic 7

Nigel,

Users of Visual Basic can access hardware devices, but only through other components. Because Visual Basic runs with windows, All of the files required to start windows, as well as the visual basic runtimes, and the application extensions (DLL fils) are all required.

With QuickBasic, direct hardware access can be performed directly without any external libraries. In fact, if you know the 8086 instruction opcodes, you can use them to CREATE libraries. Once your program is compiled as an EXE, you can boot a dumb terminal with your floppy disk, and make the program run!

In dos, the only files required are:

io.sys
msdos.sys (if your version is < 7.0)
command.com
autoexec.bat (a batch file)

If your dos version is 7.0+, then msdos.sys is just another configuration file, not a binary file.

So personally, when dealing with direct hardware access and troubleshooting, use QuickBasic.

And here is the link to QuickBasic 1.1 with other stuff like the MS-DOS editor:

**broken link removed**

and since this comes from Microsoft's site, IE will be quite happy.

mstechca said:

Nigel,

Users of Visual Basic can access hardware devices, but only through other components. Because Visual Basic runs with windows, All of the files required to start windows, as well as the visual basic runtimes, and the application extensions (DLL fils) are all required.

Click to expand...

Yes, I'm fully aware of that, the limitations are actually part of Windows NT (and NT based varients) NOT of the compiler itself, although the commands have generally been removed in 32 bit versions, as they can't be used.

With QuickBasic, direct hardware access can be performed directly without any external libraries. In fact, if you know the 8086 instruction opcodes, you can use them to CREATE libraries. Once your program is compiled as an EXE, you can boot a dumb terminal with your floppy disk, and make the program run!

Click to expand...

In DOS you can do whatever you want! - there's no OS using all the resources and stopping you doing things!.

And here is the link to QuickBasic 1.1 with other stuff like the MS-DOS editor:

**broken link removed**

Click to expand...

Again, that's NOT QuickBasic (a commercial compiler) - it's QBasic (an interpreter provides 'free' as part of DOS), which replaced the earlier GWBasic. It's basically the same as QuickBasic, but can't create EXE files, and obviously runs a GREAT deal slower.