History
Nibbles originally became popular because it was included with MS-DOS version 5.0 and above. Written in QBasic, it is one of the programs included as a demonstration of that programming language. The QBasic game uses the standard 80x25 text screen to emulate an 80x50 grid by making clever use of foreground and background colors, and the ANSI characters for full blocks and half-height blocks. Microsoft's 24kB QBasic version was copyrighted in 1990. Because of MS-DOS's prevalence at that time, it was available on almost every PC in the early 1990s. Modern computer speeds have rendered the game-speed-delay timing loops invalid, and thus the QBasic version of Nibbles requires some code changes to operate correctly on modern PCs. However, the adjustable clock rate on the DOSBox DOS emulator allows the original code to run at speeds similar to those on the original hardware. Nibbles is also runnable on QB64 as a way to avoid emulation.
Read more about this topic: Nibbles (video game)
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