Back in 1989 I was a newbie programmer writing toys in GWBASIC on old IBM XTs. The toys I wrote then followed me around for many years until one day I had a sudden need to see that old code. [What can I say it was a slow day? :)] The PCs nowadays run Qbasic, which cannot even convert old BASICA/GWBASIC code to the new format. No luck there. The Net had nothing to offer to read this kind of code either.
I decided then to write a pretty-printer which read MS format GWBASIC and outputs PostScript. Armed with one hardcopy of a 2,000 line BASIC program and a copy of the binary for the same I set to work. The initial text printer took an hour or so. Then the first two, of four, floating point formats was another 2-3 hours. I quickly realized I was close to having something more interactive.
I broke the code into sections, rewrote some of it and threw some crufty junk away. Once more armed with a small Pocket Books GWBASIC/BASICA Guide I set to work writing a GWBASIC enviroment/interpreter/executor. Currently the enviroment is well underway. The interpreter still needs 1.5 floating point formats built into it [those are hard to figure out!], and some of the stranger opcodes are still missing: PEEK, POKE, COM, etc...
Like all tiny projects this sat in a directory and gathered dust until I changed jobs and found it again. The port to BSDI was pretty damn hard, for a 1,500 line program, and I quickly gave up to adjust to my new job. Eventually I got myself a Unix box for home and started work on a BSD port again. This time I quickly found and resolved the problems and I'm back to work on it again.
I hope someone reads this who also has old GWBASIC code lying around they would like to read, write, run, and generally mess around with. If you are someone matching that description give a gander at the code on gwbasic-2.2.tar.gz and send me email at <cratliff@lily.org>
Fast forward about five years. I am currently studying the instruction sets of some common bytecode formats, Java bytecode and MSIL. Before working on a much larger project, it would be convenient to have a small test case to work with. Since I have the first half of the interpreter written, why not just implement the back end as a bytecode emitter? So, the story picks up again in November of 2001... If anyone is interested in helping, please drop me a line.
Written by Christian A. Ratliff
Floating Point Format by Matt Nelson
Name and Testing by Erik Barstow
based on Microsoft GW-BASIC 3.23
(c) Copyright Microsoft 1983,1984,1985,1986,1987,1988