I did something very similar as a kid - a bunch of almost like DEMOSCENE stuff (simple line rotations, psetting all over the place, doppler sound effects, etc.) before dropping the user into a TUI with little games, etc.

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!

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alexjplant 4 days ago | parent [-]

Kindred spirits! Me discovering that QuickBasic was able to liberate my proggies (as I called them for a brief stint) from the confines of the editor by compiling them to EXEs was one of the happiest moments of my young computer life.

Hacking EXPLORER.EXE and changing the Start Menu side graphic with Borland Resource Workshop was another notable one.

	▲	vunderba 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Love it. One fun hack that I figured out as a kid was that while you couldn't get rid of the mouse in Win9x - you could deliberately create a completely transparent "CUR" file. 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.