Bochs VS qb64

The following is a pretty decent historical page about the pre-(U)EFI MBR (Master Boot Record) boot process:

https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/STDMBR.htm

Note that EFI/UEFI -- occurred much later in time than MBR...

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

You might also wish to check out some emulators, most notably Bochs (https://bochs.sourceforge.io/) and QEMU (https://www.qemu.org/) because they simulate the boot process, and if you're in their debuggers, you should be able to inspect that process step by step -- but also more generally emulators for other machines/platforms/architectures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_system_emulat...) -- because in general, most of those emulators should simulate the given machine/platform/architecture's boot process...

With both of those you can make some really nice DOS programs. Which you can then run in bochs (not virtualized, but an emulator. Close enough :) ).

Just took a look myself, check this out:

I seem to remember some pretty serious (as in actual paid) programs written in QuickBASIC - the compiled version of QBASIC.

Lots and lots of 'business middleware' was written in various forms of BASIC, the most famous being VBA, but also quite a bit in things like QuickBASIC in an older period.

https://qb64.com keeps the dream alive.

Most people are posting links to hardware, but in my mind, this is a software question. Maybe one of those BASIC interpreters with an integrated IDE, the way that QBASIC used to be on older Windows versions?

QB64 is the modern equivalent: https://qb64.com/

Your kids won't literally need to navigate the command line to launch the games. But I think that editing config files to "hack" the game is still on the table :-)

Many, really. QuickBASIC is very complete. You can easily install it in DosBOX to take a look, or download QB64 (https://qb64.com/) for a similar but more modern experience.

Some specifics that are in my mind as "must haves" are user-defined functions, file I/O, records (aka structs), syntax checking / interactive help in the editor...

https://qb64.com/ does actually get updated :)

OpenWatcom is a very nice compiler and debugger. Another one is QB64.

QB64 compiles QBasic to either C or C++; not sure which. But it might not be useful for generating standalone C++ code.

For my 9-year-old boy, I picked QB64 [1] and things are going very well. The experience is identical to old QBasic, but with a saner language that encourages to declare the type of variables.

At the moment we are following [2], which seems perfect for a child of that age.

[1] https://github.com/QB64Official/qb64 is the repo to follow: after the dramatic split of the dev community happened in 2022, the older one is not used anymore.

[2] https://www.qb64tutorial.com/