QBasic - Delays

Delays - slowing or pausing a program

Sometimes you may want to slow or pause your program. There are four ways this can be done.

Use TIMER, this is a good method for pausing or slowing down a program to intervals of around a quarter of a second.

SLEEP, a method of pausing a program for a whole number of seconds. Useful when displaying "splash" screens.

Do nothing loops, loops that simply count to a number then exit. This is not generally a good programming practice, but is an option. When using this method the results vary from computer to computer, but it is easy to implement.

WAIT, a method of introducing a very small delay into a program. The &H3DA, 8 part waits for a screen refresh.

'Delay.bas      Ray Thomas      April 2002

'Program to demonstrate delays

DIM Text AS STRING      'Text to print
DIM Count AS INTEGER    'Loop counter
DIM Start AS SINGLE     'Timer variable

Text$ = "Ray wrote this"

CLS

PRINT
PRINT "Example using a TIMER delay"
PRINT

TIMER ON
FOR Count = 1 TO LEN(Text$)
        Start = TIMER
        PRINT MID$(Text$, Count, 1);
        DO
        LOOP UNTIL TIMER > Start + .3
NEXT Count
TIMER OFF

PRINT
PRINT
PRINT
PRINT "Example using a SLEEP delay"
PRINT

FOR Count = 1 TO LEN(Text$)
        PRINT MID$(Text$, Count, 1);
        SLEEP 1
NEXT Count

PRINT
PRINT
PRINT
PRINT "Example using a delay loop"
PRINT

FOR Count = 1 TO LEN(Text$)
        Start = 0
        PRINT MID$(Text$, Count, 1);
        DO
                Start = Start + 1
        LOOP UNTIL Start = 100000
NEXT Count

PRINT
PRINT
PRINT
PRINT "Example using a WAIT delay"
PRINT

FOR Count = 1 TO LEN(Text$)
        PRINT MID$(Text$, Count, 1);
        WAIT &H3DA, 8
        WAIT &H3DA, 8, 8
NEXT Count

END

Pausing a program until the user presses a key, or a combination of keys, is covered in on my Inputs page.

The programs on this page, like all the programs written for this site, can be downloaded from the DLoads page.

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