Load Commodore PET tapes into Apple

[carlsson]

Has anyone tried this 35 year old method for importing Commodore PET BASIC programs into an Apple ][ series? I am a little curious, but typing in 3.5 pages of assembly code bothers me a little these days. I suppose I could type in the code in some text editor and use a cross assembler to get a program that I can upload to the Apple e.g. through ADTPro, but still it is quite a lot of work compared to detokenizing a PET program and retokenize it with whichever Apple based tools there are, since a bit of rework is required anyway.

 

http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue8/3048_1_THE_APPLE_GAZETTE.php

(click on the link to Archive.org to get the scanned paper with full listing)

[david__schmidt]

I can't imagine this being useful, in practice. It's a little like OCRing a program from a scan... you have to proofread the whole thing anyway after the conversion.

 

Due to the typical screen-handling control characters (and goodness knows, all the peeks and pokes) it doesn't make a ton of sense to do an automatic conversion of BASIC, even though retokenization will get you 80% of the way there, text-wise. You still have 95% of the work ahead of you to get the rest working sensibly. It makes much more sense to just analyze the program at hand and re-engineer it as you go when re-coding for a new platform. Very little software was vanilla BASIC that took no advantage of the target system's capabilities.