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Hi all,
today I was trying to find an old program of mine written in QuickBasic. It's been a few years since my last QuickBasic program.

Anyway, I recovered a whole batch of old sources, then I started my good old QuickBasic 4.5, but when I opened one of the old source files I only got a couple of strange characters. Same thing with other old sources.

Now if I try to open some newer (but still quite old) sources, I have no problems. Looking with an hex-editor I see the sources are differently encoded (they are both binary encoded, the newer ones and the older ones).
The newer ones start with a 0xFC char, while the older ones start with 0xFF char.

I really can't remember what's going on and how to recover... but I really would like to recover those old sources. Best thing would be an automated way to convert everything to ASCII... is it possible?
Is there somebody that knows where's the problem, and how to recover?

Please....

Thankyou!
Bye

Cris

QB4.5 and PDS7.1 have a biniary quick save option.... You most likely need to open these .BASs with PDS7.1 if QB4.5 wont. Cause last I remember, they had different binary BAS formats....

Hope that helps.... :wink:

Is it possible that some of these old source programs of yours are prior to QuickBasic, that is, they're GWBasic programs? If you still have a version of GWBasic, or Basic, or Basica, you might try loading these old programs.

Before QuickBasic, in the above old Basic's, I remember that there were 2 ways to save a source file:
1) As a "tokenized" source file. Some people call these "binary".
2) As an ASCII source file.

I have QuickBasic 4.5, and I don't know any way of saving the source file as "tokenized". Can you really do this? Are these the type of tokenized source files that you have?

I suspect that these source files and the version of QuickBasic that you have, are different versions. Based on the dates of these source files, you'll probably have to try several QuickBasic versions. Good luck.
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qb 4.5:





as most opeople already know, binary format is OBSOLETE, it doesn't take 3 minutes to writre a 10k file into a disk anymore. just use ASCII.

Hi Moneo!

Quote:Is it possible that some of these old source programs of yours are prior to QuickBasic, that is, they're GWBasic programs? If you still have a version of GWBasic, or Basic, or Basica, you might try loading these old programs.

Thankyou. I am almost sure they were written with QB, although it could have been 4.0 instead of 4.5. I don't think they changed the binary format between 4.0 and 4.5, did they?

If it was not QB, It could have been BASICA. Quite difficult to get my hands on that now. Is there anybody who knows greater details on these "binary" formats? (to write a decoder)

Quote:Before QuickBasic, in the above old Basic's, I remember that there were 2 ways to save a source file:
1) As a "tokenized" source file. Some people call these "binary".
2) As an ASCII source file.

I have QuickBasic 4.5, and I don't know any way of saving the source file as "tokenized". Can you really do this? Are these the type of tokenized source files that you have?

Yes, it can be done (see another reply here). This is the kind of files I have (the most recent ones).

Thankyou for your help!!
Bye

Cris

Quote:qb 4.5:


as most opeople already know, binary format is OBSOLETE, it doesn't take 3 minutes to writre a 10k file into a disk anymore. just use ASCII.

Cha0s, thanks for the visual evidence that a source file can be saved as "binary" from the IDS of QB4.5. Since I never used the IDS, just the compiler, I was never aware of this.
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