Star Trek X The Search for The BOB's White Cake

[james2464]

It was a fractional delay used for smoother animation. Back in the day, we didn't have tools like frames limit (_LIMIT) or fractional delays like _delay .05. SLEEP 1 was a full second and got messed up if the user sat on the keyboard (the second timer quits when a key is pressed and the sleep terminates). The other trick, but not available in QB64 was to use SOUND 0, .1, which would produce a slight silent delay.

Pete

PS Bob was happy to hear you found the programs a useful source of information. I sure wish we could drag him out of retirement someday. Recently he did state if he found the right project to inspire him, he might get back to coding. Maybe next year we can run a think up a program for TheBOB contest. I mean for some reason, lost on me, all the SCREEN zero stuff I still post of The QBasic Forum hasn't brought him back!

Pete

Thanks for the interesting explanation.   Nice to know those tricks that were used for optimization. 

I'm enjoying Bob's programming.   A couple other interesting commands that I've noticed...

Code: (Select All)

Out &H3C8, 0

Code: (Select All)

Swap ActivePAGE, VisualPAGE 'SWAP values of page variables...
Screen 9, , ActivePAGE, VisualPAGE 'which toggles active/visual page

Definitely a great resource.  I hope he finds a new project to work on!   Meanwhile I'm going through those programs and I'll have questions I'm sure.