While theoretically not as fast as a compiled program, these scripts are often much faster than a compiled 16-bit program. The user can run an HTA much like another real EXE from Windows, via the Start Menu or any shortcut - just double-click.įor anything that must be a command-line routine, use Windows Script Host ('WSH') instead. There is also a special tag you can use to get some additional control over your HTA. HTM you gain access to a more relaxed scripting security model than a normal web page has. Well if those Windows NT machines have IE 5+ deployed on them, to tell you the truth I'd look at using HTML Applications (HTAs) for much of this sort of thing.Īn HTA is basically a stand-alone disk-based web page (.HTM) that uses DHTML (JScript and/or VBScript) inline.

RE: QuickBasic for Windows Nepheligenous (TechnicalUser) The VB5/6 forum here had a recent thread on this topic. Net SDK and an open source product called #develop. You might consider looking at VB.Net or C#, which are free by installing the. It is a little late to get on the VB5/6 bandwagon. Windows Script Host is a good host for some scripting, though using IE as the host by writing HTAs (HTML Applicatons) offers a richer GUI model. VBScript makes a good free alternative for Windows programming. That's true either under DOS or NT though. Running the command prompt in 50-line mode makes VBDOS almost viable - good enough until my older stuff gets rewritten for Windows. Even here you get DOS-mode character-graphics MsgBox's and dialogs though. Of course the screen updates are faster full-screen than not. The real mode emulation seems fairly good for my purposes, and even software interrupt access to this 'virtual DOS' works in many cases. I have compiled VBDOS programs that work fine under XP, windowed or full-screen. I'd be interested to hear in what ways NTVDM on WinXP is lacking. This can be done by manually making PIFs invoke and run QBasic or your compiled programs, or by starting a shell from Start|Run and initiating 16-bit programs from there. The most important factor I've seen under WinXP is to be sure you run your QBasic under and not the 32 bit shell cmd.exe, which is the default NT command-line shell. Which NT OS? 4.0? 5.0 (Windows 2000)? 5.1 (Windows XP)?įancy graphics, numerous 16-bit libraries, direct twiddling of hardware or low-level DOS stuff. I think it depends a great deal on what you are doing in your QBasic programs.

Liberty basic software wrapper