So I wanted to build more than just a simple online QuickBasic simulator - I've seen a few of them but they all kind of fall apart at the last mile.

You really can't create a QuickBasic interpreter with any expectation of accuracy unless you also flesh out the corresponding hardware that would have accompanied it back in the day.

What I’m really aiming for is to recreate the world we grew up with as kids in the late ’80s and ’90s. I want to tap into that feeling of discovering QuickBASIC on a computer for the first time and realizing you could bring your own creations to life.

For me, and I bet a lot of kids back then, QuickBASIC was the closest thing to sorcery: you could conjure whatever was in your imagination and watch it traced out pixel by pixel on your 14-inch VGA monitor.