DirectQB

The official DirectQB library homepage

DirectQB is a full-featured game programming library for QuickBasic 4.5. It is entirely written in assembly 386, to ensure a very fast execution of your programs; it has over 130 functions, from graphics handling up to input devices, sounds playback, datafiles and more...
Discover the many features of this library on this page, and download it now!

Library features

Current library version is 1.61.

Graphical features:

Supports 320x200 with 256 colors video mode, with almost unlimited number of off-screen buffers stored into EMS or into conventional memory. EMS is automatically handled for you internally by the library

All the functions act on the screen as well as on the off-screen buffers

Several drawing primitives, including pset, line, gline, ellipse, box, full box and paint

Fast sprite handling functions, compatible with standard GET and PUT, also with support for sprite scaling, roto-zooming and translucency, puting over other sprites, as well as direct sprite drawing from EMS

Sprites collision detection with selectable method (bounding box or pixel perfect), also with support for collision layers

Color blending routines to handle up to 10 customizable blender maps, allowing to create any color combination

Clipping for almost all the graphical functions

Loads and saves images of any size in BSAVE, BMP and PCX file format

Fast font routines with customizable non-fixed sized font set, and support for styles, color blending and textured text

Smooth palette handling with routines to fade the current palette into any new one as well as into any specified color, and to rotate colors

Multidirectional scrolling for specified areas or for an entire layer

Transparent screen copy for parallax scrolling effects, blended layer copy for huge translucency effects

Flat-shaded, gouraud-shaded and texture-mapped fast triangle drawing also with support for color blending and bilinear-filtering

Fast buffered FLI animations player

Input features:

Custom keyboard interrupts handler that allows to know the state (pressed or released) of any key at any time
Fast and easy to use joystick routines, with auto detection and auto calibration, supporting 2 and 4 buttons joysticks
Mouse handler: the mouse variables (coordinates and buttons status) are automatically updated when you move the mouse, allowing you to know the actual state at any time without calling other routines
Mouse routines to change the cursor shape, mouse range, positions and speed

Sound features:

IRQ driver sound engine for easy sounds playback via DMA transfers
Loads and plays sound effects directly from EMS
Supports only 8-bit mono WAV files, up to 22 KHz
Customizable number of channels, from 1 up to 32, for up to 32 sound effects simultaneously playing
Customizable volume setting and resampling rate for each of the voices
Customizable master volume setting and sampling rate (from 4 up to 22 KHz)

Misc features:

Free EMS for personal purposes
Bit handling routines, including read/set/reset/toggle bit, shift left and right
Routine to find the color in the current palette that best fits with the specified red, green and blue hues
High precision timer to syncronize your graphics at a specified framerate
Directory and drive handling routines, with support for Windows long filenames
Fast customizable array sorting
Routine to find the angle between any two given points
Integrated error messages system
Datafiles decoding routines, with support for password-crypted data
Library manager utility shipped within the package, that allows you to completely customize your copy of DirectQB on your needs

The future of DirectQB

During the last months I've been busy with my studies and with Project RT, so the works on DQB 1.7 have been slowed down a lot... I already have the serial communications module ready, but untested (it would require a null-modem cable, that currently I don't own); I also have many ideas of improvements for the whole library, so maybe version 1.7 will never see the sunlight, while I'll directly work on version 2.0. If you've read the news on the main page you should know some of these ideas I have in mind... XMS instead of EMS (also because EMS causes crashes sometimes under my Winblows 98), LZW compression, maybe a MIDI player (without SBMIDI - I've now got almost all the knowledge to code it), finally a super put routine that allows rotations, blending and other stuff all together on the same sprite, and more... This anyway is a long-time project, so don't expect it to come out in less than a couple of months; in the future, see the projects page for details, and now keep on using version 1.61 for your programs.

Downloads

Files are compressed with Winzip, and they come with the full source code.

File Author Format (size) Description

DIRECTQB.ZIP Angelo Mottola Zip-File
(208 Kb) DirectQB library distribuition file, version 1.61. Comes without the .LIB nor the .BI files; run the DQBMAN (DQB library manager) program to create them depending on your needs.