Opening or converting GFA Basic files to something readable?

Question

There is a bunch of GFA BASIC for Amiga files (the source code for Blender's ancestor, Traces, downloadable here: http://zgodzinski.com/blender-prehistory/) that I would like to peek at.

Despite my efforts, I couldn't find any software to open or convert these files to something readable and that would run on Windows 10 64-bit.

Is my only solution to run an Amiga emulator and somehow find a copy of GFA BASIC for it?

I'm afraid I can't help you with your question, but I wanted to thank you for posting a really interesting link. I toyed with Blender years ago and I had no idea of it's connection to Traces or the Amiga - I totally enjoyed the diversion... — Geo..., Jan 04 '19 at 18:25
Just to save folks time: mmuman/gfalist: Reads tokenized GFA BASIC version 3.x source files (.GFA) and converts them to human readable ASCII listings (.LST). doesn't seem to work on the files. From memory, GFA BASIC source files can also contain arbitrary files (used to use that to distribute Amiga binaries than needed libraries) so detokenizing isn't trivial. X11-Basic, a modern GFA BASIC implementation, doesn't read tokenized source. — scruss, Jan 05 '19 at 21:33

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 05 '19 at 21:55

Looks like someone on Atari forum posted the text a while back: convert Amiga GFA Basic file to Atari - Atari-Forum. As you can't see the files without a login, I have mirrored them as text here: scruss/AmigaTraces-GFA_Source: BASIC source for the forerunner of Blender.

X11-Basic, a modern GFA BASIC implementation, will likely not run this source. Portability was not GFA BASIC's strong point.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 04 '19 at 16:22

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I think you could use GFA Basic 32 to run GFA Basic programs on Windows. This should allow you to extract the source code from the tokenised file.

If that doesn't work, a hex editor and patience should result in you eventually figuring out how to extract the code from the tokenised file, a bit like this.

answered Jan 04 '19 at 16:22

wizzwizz4

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I initially tried GFA Basic 32 but it looks like it only understands its own format, not the one of GFA BASIC on Amiga. – François Beaune Jan 04 '19 at 17:08
@FrançoisBeaune Aw... You could direct a question to that site's info@ address if you want official support. – wizzwizz4 Jan 04 '19 at 17:10
@wizzwizz4 come on, that’s uncalled for. – Stephen Kitt Jan 04 '19 at 22:53
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@StephenKitt Yeah, that came across sarcastically; that was not the intention at all. – wizzwizz4 Jan 04 '19 at 22:57

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 04 '19 at 17:55

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You can run Amiga GFA Basic (no idea about legal status) in WinUAE then "print" the listings to a file.

answered Jan 04 '19 at 17:55

tofro

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Opening or converting GFA Basic files to something readable?

3 Answers3