So you’ve dreamed of programming again in QuickBasic, on an old, dying computer? I had the same dream. Cool Retro Term fulfills our dreams.
The details
First, let’s get the venerable QBasic from here: http://www.qbasic.net/en/qbasic-downloads/compiler/qbasic-compiler.htm
Simply click to download QBasic 4.5 EN.
Unzip the downloaded file to your /home/ folder (/home/your-username/), so that you see the new /qb45/ folder there (/home/your-username/qb45/).
Next, ensure Cool Retro Term is installed, details here: https://ugotsta.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/a-quick-video-intro-for-cool-retro-term/
Once that’s installed, run it, then resize terminal so that it’s 25 x 80 (25 row height by 80 column width).
Install Dosemu by entering the following in the terminal:
sudo apt-get install dosemu
Once that’s installed, run it like so:
dosemu -t
The ‘-t’ parameter lets Dosemu know to send its output to the current terminal. You should see a DOS command prompt in the terminal, like so:
Dosemu will mount your /home/ folder as a drive, so we can easily access the files there. To get to the file we downloaded, at the ‘C:\>‘ prompt, enter ‘d:‘.
C:\>d:
You’ll notice the command prompt change to ‘D:\>‘. Go to the QBasic folder by entering ‘cd qb45‘.
D:\>cd qb45
Type ‘qb‘ to run QBasic.
D:\>qb
That’s it!
You’ve now got QuickBasic running through the original interface it was designed for.
You can easily exit QuickBasic by typing Alt F to open the file menu, then selecting Exit.
And to exist Dosemu, just type ‘exitemu‘.
D:\>exitemu
Hope you have some BASIC fun. 🙂
