AmigaBasic: The S3 AmigaBasic class

In AmigaFFH: Commodore Amiga File Format Handler

The S3 AmigaBasic class

Description

A class that represents the content of Amiga Basic files.

Details

Amiga Basic is a BASIC-style programming language that was shipped with early Commodore Amiga machines. It requires an interpreter to run an Amiga Basic script. The AmigaFFH package does not interpret Amiga Basic scripts. It does allow for encoding and decoding scripts in the binary format in which it was originally stored on the Amiga. Amiga Basic scripts were stored as encoded binaries instead of ASCII text files in order to save (at the time precious) memory and disk space.

Amiga Basic binary files start with a file header (as an identifier) and is followed by each line of the script as binary data. The AmigaBasic-class object stores each line of the script as a list item as a vector of raw data. Use as.character and as.AmigaBasic to switch between character data and AmigaBasic-class objects.

Note

Although there is ample reference material on the Amiga BASIC language, there is no documentation available on the script file storage format. The implementation in the AmigaFFH package is all the result of painstaking reverse engineering on my part. Consequently the Amiga Basic file encoders and decoders implemented here may not be infallible.

Author(s)

Pepijn de Vries

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaBASIC

See Also

Other AmigaBasic.operations: AmigaBasic.reserved(), AmigaBasicBMAP, [.AmigaBasic(), as.AmigaBasicBMAP(), as.AmigaBasic(), as.character(), check.names.AmigaBasic(), names.AmigaBasic(), rawToAmigaBasicBMAP(), rawToAmigaBasic(), read.AmigaBasicBMAP(), read.AmigaBasic(), write.AmigaBasic()

Examples

## Not run: 
## This creates an AmigaBasic-class object:
bas <- as.AmigaBasic("PRINT \"hello world!\"")

## This will decode the object as plain text:
as.character(bas)

## End(Not run)

AmigaFFH documentation built on Aug. 27, 2023, 9:07 a.m.