Re: [Audyssey] Getting into programming

[Travis Siegel]

There's a reason powerbasic has the word power in it's name.  If you want 
to know everything it can do, go read their web page, they have a complete 
feature set, and you can even download the manuals if you like, and read 
them in full before ever purchasing the product.  I'm not much of a 
windows user anymore, and haven't been for more than 10 years, but when I 
do need windows work done, I almost always yank out my powerbasic compiler 
to do the work, because it's so simple to do it.  You can create internet 
servers with something like 3 or 4 lines of code (they have samples that 
come with the compiler) and you can build res files that include all your 
graphics and sounds, that get distributed with your programs, and even 
compile those res files into the executable, so there's no need to 
distribute extra files just to make your game work.  One single 
executable, with all the sounds, graphics, icons, and anything else you 
need for your program to work, and nobody needs to download anything 
except one single executable file.  I know you can do that with other 
languages too, but it's such a difficult process, folks rarely bother to 
do this,  with powerbasic, it's as simple as creating a text file with the 
filenames, and running the reseditor on it.  That's all there is to it. 
For an example of this, go check out the battleship game I released back 
in 2002, (I think it's still at 
http://www.nfbcal.org/tsiegel/battle10.exe) and see what I mean.  That has 
a single executable file, and all sounds are included, and the entire game 
is still only a couple hundred K in size.  I recently wrote a memory game 
for the raspberry pi, and with all the sounds, it's a hundred megabytes or 
morein size, and each one of the sound files needs to be present for the 
game to work, because res files don't exist on linux. :)
The plus to that is that you can replace the sounds with ones of your 
choice, so that does help, but still, for ease of use, for windows 
programming, I've never found anything easier.
On OSX (at least early versions of 10.4 and 10.5) Java was my language of 
choice, because it could build guis with almost no effort, and for my 
raspberry pi, I use either C or pascal, (depending on what I'm doing), but 
on windows, I keep going back to powerbasic, because it's so darned easy. 
:)


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