Happy 35th birthday, IBM PC!
August 12, 1981 introduced us to the IBM PC, and to PC-DOS along with it. The latter included extensions for the machine's ROM BASIC, plus a slew of demonstration programs proudly showing off these indispensable capabilities: 4-color graphics and 1-bit beeper sound. One of them in particular went on to live in certain infamy as Bill Gates' first (and only) direct personal contribution to video game history: the inimitable DONKEY.
So I'm a few days late to the party, but hopefully my little present can still be accepted: Sorry Ass, a tiny remake of DONKEY.BAS designed to fit into a standard floppy disk's 512-byte boot sector. The only requirements are 8088+, CGA+, a keyboard and a disk drive, so this should run on most x86-based PCs all the way back to the original IBM 5150. For an appropriately eardrum-raping approximation of the jackass greeting your bumper, the PC speaker is also supported.
Assembly source is included, plus a 442-byte .COM version for use under DOS. The 360KB disk image is bootable and can be written directly to a floppy, or started from DOSBox ("boot SorryAss.ima"), PCEm, and so on; if you're so inclined you can pad it with zero bytes to your favorite standard disk size.
1 comment:
A question I have had, ever since loading the DOS 2.11 "SAMPLES" disk and playing DONKEY as a young lad, is why on earth getting hit by a car counts as "winning" for the donkey. I am glad to see this remake has been faithful to reproduce this.