This is on the IBM PCjr. The same should work on a CGA card ( or card in CGA mode ). With the exception of using the PALETTE command which might only be available with a PCjr enhanced BASIC ( maybe Tandy 1000 as well ).

As an added bonus I used the PALETTE command and swapped the cyan and magenta colours for light and dark grey and it’s hard to tell your not in 80 column mode! #retrocomputing.

80 column text in 40 column mode.

So I totally forgot about this but if you are in screen 2 mode in BASICA (640x200x2) and save the screen buffer (BSAVE). Then switch to screen mode 1 (320x200x 4), reload the screen buffer (BLOAD). You can still easily read the 80 col text that was stored but in 40 col mode! #retrocomputing

I recently uncovered some old backups (~1994) from when I was daily driving OS/2. Here’s an unfinished game I must have been working on.

Well I wouldn’t say that I did too much other than prompt. But it basically created exactly what I needed. I can even update/enhance with new features with ease. If you notice, there is even an AI option in the app which will generate an ANSI art image for you.

Spent over an hour searching for a Linux app for 16 colour ANSI art/drawing and could not find good one or one that I could install. Gave up and spent approx 40mins and generated one to my liking using Google AI Studio. Fun yet scary.

This was my attempt to recreate the arcade game “Bank Panic” using PC BASIC on my IBM PCjr, probably sometime early 1996. I recall the robbers were drawn using the DRAW command.

IBM PCjr running Big Top

Haven’t played this game for a while. I always liked it but I was never any good. I’m still not.

IBM PCjr 40th Anniversary Animation (Part 2) Introduction In the previous post, I tried to illustrate the mechanism I used to produce smooth vertical and horizontal scrolling. In this post, I want to describe the steps I used to create the ac…

Here’s my second installment describing a few details of how I created the assets for the PCjr’s 40th animation.
whitaker8088.wordpress.com/2025/10/07/i...

IBM PCjr 40th Anniversary Animation (Part 1) As a challenge, I decided to create something for the IBM PCjr 40th anniversary (Nov 2023 (yeah I know it’s now 2025)). I started tinkering with the idea of creating some sort of tiled/pannin…

Only 18months late but I finally finished a blog post describing some of the design/implementation details for the 40th anniversary for the IBM PCjr
whitaker8088.wordpress.com/2025/08/03/i...