Suppose that QBasic is not widely available in a certain country. Well one university in that country need only purchase one copy of Microsoft QuickBasic 4.5 or Visual Basic for DOS, and use it to turn each BAS file from this website into a standalone EXE file. Both BAS and EXE files can be supplied to the end user. The user is then free to decide whether it is worth acquiring QBasic.
We would be interested to know if the same thing can be done with PowerBASIC. Can anybody help?
The author owns both the above Microsoft BASIC compilers, and PKZIP. Next to every BAS file on this website you will find a ZIP file, which is compressed from an EXE file produced by Visual Basic for DOS. In some cases, such as with the relativistic flight simulator, we recommend that you make an effort to run the EXE file because the performance is better.
Please report back to the author on success or failure with unzipping and running these files. From the System's point of view, BAS and ZIP files are not recognised files like HTM and GIF files, and so they may be deleted at random, presumably because the System thinks they are spurious or expendible in some way. If you find a file not there, please tell the author, but please don't blame him.
There is of course nothing to stop you compiling some BAS files with your own compiler and unzipping others from here. You might do this if some ZIP files are missing.
If the end user gets EXE files supplied, one way or another, then the file README.TXT needs to be amended. An alternative version can be found in TEXTFILE.HTM which should be saved and supplied as README.TXT just the same.