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Wasn't there a way to tell BASIC to save in ASCII, rather than tokenized? Something like sticking ",A" onto the end of the save command? Or maybe I'm thinking o

Wasn't there a way to tell BASIC to save in ASCII, rather than tokenized? Something like sticking ",A" onto the end of the save command? Or maybe I'm thinking of gwbasic ..

ale42 2y ago
Not sure about BASICA, but GWBASIC definitely had this ",A" at the end of the filename to save in text format. It even had a ",P" flag to save in "protected" tokenized format (which you can't "officially" list, although a POKE at the good undocumented place could remove the flag: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/hsn/chm/gwbasic.chm/tokens-pgwbp.html https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/hsn/chm/gwbasic.chm/to...).
- livrem 2y ago
  That was a fun way to find the address and POKE it. Never knew of any of this, but it inspired me to search for more info, and it looks like there are also easier ways to unprotect files: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7104/how-were-microsoft-gw-basic-protected-files-encoded https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7104/how-... https://slions.net/threads/deciphering-gw-basic-basica-protected-programs.50/ https://slions.net/threads/deciphering-gw-basic-basica-prote... I remember seeing some BASIC games that could not be listed. Found that very frustrating as a kid trying to learn BASIC. Maybe now I can finally get to see something of how those games were made, assuming that at least some games were only protected in this way. Just opening the file in PC-BASIC seems to be the easiest solution: "PC-BASIC can read and write Protected files created by GW-BASIC. Unlike GW-BASIC, however, it does not disable accessing the unencrypted contents of the file. The encryption used by GW-BASIC has been broken many decades ago, so Protected mode offered little protection anyway; disallowing access is a small security hazard as it would allow someone to send you a program that you cannotinspect before running it."

Wasn't there a way to tell BASIC to save in ASCII, rather than tokenized? Something like sticking ",A" onto the end of the save command? Or maybe I'm thinking of gwbasic ..

ale42 2y ago

Not sure about BASICA, but GWBASIC definitely had this ",A" at the end of the filename to save in text format. It even had a ",P" flag to save in "protected" tokenized format (which you can't "officially" list, although a POKE at the good undocumented place could remove the flag: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/hsn/chm/gwbasic.chm/tokens-pgwbp.html https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/hsn/chm/gwbasic.chm/to...).

livrem 2y ago
That was a fun way to find the address and POKE it. Never knew of any of this, but it inspired me to search for more info, and it looks like there are also easier ways to unprotect files: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7104/how-were-microsoft-gw-basic-protected-files-encoded https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7104/how-... https://slions.net/threads/deciphering-gw-basic-basica-protected-programs.50/ https://slions.net/threads/deciphering-gw-basic-basica-prote... I remember seeing some BASIC games that could not be listed. Found that very frustrating as a kid trying to learn BASIC. Maybe now I can finally get to see something of how those games were made, assuming that at least some games were only protected in this way. Just opening the file in PC-BASIC seems to be the easiest solution: "PC-BASIC can read and write Protected files created by GW-BASIC. Unlike GW-BASIC, however, it does not disable accessing the unencrypted contents of the file. The encryption used by GW-BASIC has been broken many decades ago, so Protected mode offered little protection anyway; disallowing access is a small security hazard as it would allow someone to send you a program that you cannotinspect before running it."