My best good friend still has a copy of it someplace on a floppy disk because we would run it on the computer that he put together out of spare parts on a piece of plywood. Thankfully he has a family and is too busy to dig it up and send it to me so I'm spared the embarrassment that would come with seeing it.
I'm always happy to see projects like this and OHRRPGCE where people did something useful with the language.
http://qbasicgui.datacomponents.net/
Ans this site has more
It was a popular style of project. Some even implemented their own programming languages so they could multitask applications written for them by running lines from each app in a round-robin fashion.
Because QBasic would run on versions of Windows NT that had the NTVDM (virtual DOS machine) I used it as a scripting language on early NT systems I supported. Eventually I moved over to VBScript under Windows Scripting Host when it arrived on the scene.
Me too! Well, sort of. Between the ages of 14 and 19 I worked as a part-time helpdesk technician. When I started we used a series of bootable floppies with DOS to use Symantec Ghost. If memory serves two floppies were required - the first had DOS and the requisite NIC driver and the second was universal and merely had GHOST.EXE on it. I developed a bootable USB memory stick image comprising all of the NIC drivers along with Ghost and a series of other useful things like a WinPE environment and maaaaaybe a Linux one via loadlin.exe. I ended up making a boot menu/shell for it in QuickBasic.
It was still in use a year or two after I'd moved to doing software engineering professionally. I wonder whether it's sitting in a drawer someplace on the other side of the country. I also wonder how this thread turned into a chronicle of my youthful programming misadventures :-D
I remember first reading about the DATA command in the IDE built-in help (what a fantastic resource) and laboriously copying my drawings of monsters on graph paper into lines of comma-delimited ones and zeroes in DATA statements.
Since we had a copy of QuickBasic 4.5 I was able to compile it to an EXE and place it in the AUTOEXEC.BAT - fun times!
Hacking EXPLORER.EXE and changing the Start Menu side graphic with Borland Resource Workshop was another notable one.
Watching an adult try to navigate in Windows with an invisible mouse was like the digital equivalent of using a dowsing rod to find water.
I wonder what you'd consider the tradeoffs of QBasic vs something intentionally geared towards IF, like Inform[0]?
Unfortunately, when I start the exe file in DOSBox Staging it only clears the screen, shows me a blinking cursor, and then does not seem to do anything beyond that.
OP says that they've been at it for decades so my guess would be it started as a QBASIC game but then was later ported over to use QB64 and its modern features.