I had an idea for software that interprets old games using mostly HLE principles. The interpreter could run BASIC games (especially QBASIC games) better and with more ease of use. There were once several large QBASIC communities on the internet, that created a large body of multimedia demos and games. Modern interpreters can’t handle the dialect of QBASIC (though they come close, they stop on errors), so all of those programs are impossible to play without a QBASIC 1.1 binary for DOS.
Some old QBASIC games are unrecoverable since they were compiled using QuickBasic 4.5 and the source was not released. This was very shortsighted–I’m not sure what they thought they would gain by making a short solo-coded game, and releasing it for free but hiding the source. I tried a few times to get DarkDread to release his QBASIC source code for “The Secret of Cooey” games and other games, but he did not respond (though his website is still up).
Many QBASIC games can still be salvaged for historical purposes. If a more “unsafe” interpreter (readonly by default) was made, it could show errors and continue–so it could be called BluffBASIC. If I or someone made this, I would like to review some of the older games and allow people to try my games: