GW-Basic Program Decoder
GW-BASIC (aka GWBASIC or Gee-Whiz Basic) was a BASIC interpreter developed by Microsoft and bundled with MS-DOS until the advent of QBASIC with MS-DOS 5.0. GW-BASIC stored programs in memory at a time when memory was very scarce. Hence it used a compact, binary representation of code. It used this same binary format for code saved on disk, which makes it hard to read GW-BASIC programs nowadays.
Or at least it used to. Thanks to this site, I was able to write a decoder in Python. Upload your .BAS file below and you’ll get a human-readable version of the program back out. Enjoy!
If you’d like to see the source code, it’s available here.
Note This program is incomplete — it doesn’t correctly parse double-precision values yet.
danvk.org » Reading Old GW-Basic Programs said,
February 3, 2008 at 3:50 am
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