Re: I hope that other Pete comes here to read this thread pretty soon...

I am not exactly sure what the primary goal of FB is, besides providing a BASIC with QB-syntax. There are many game developers in the community, and FB does have some game-orientated APIs (like mouse/joystick support), but the majority of the new stuff is just more of what QB had: arbitrary windowed and fullscreen resolutions, ability to preserve array element values when using ReDim, the ability to get pre-parsed command-line arguments with Command, more native datatypes and numeric literals, Unicode encoded source files, etc.

My view is that FB is a great tool for those who like BASIC and are familiar with QB. Most QB code I've written in the past was easily portable to FB, and I never felt like I was learning an entirely new language in doing so (maybe I'm just lucky). I was already used to creating and using external libraries in QB, and the ability to create new programs using either the old QB run-time or interface directly with external 32-bit C libraries made me forget about my old code.

It's too bad you had problems with FB and your code. But, after so many years of QB experience, I can't imagine that learning a new BASIC that may be even slightly different than QB would be difficult at all for you (PB as a whole seems more of a departure from QB than FB, even given the alleged increased compatibility). I guess for some, old code is more important, and that is fine too. :)