GFA Token File Format

[babyface]

Hi folks. Does anyone have information about the format of the GFA basic source files? I would like to build an environment where I can write GFA code on a PC, but use the GFA compiler in a Hatari emulator to compile these sources. However, the compiler requires a GFA file (which is some kind of binary, tokenized format), so I would need to convert my ASCII source files to the ".GFA" format before feeding them to the compiler.

 

So - is there any documentation about the ".GFA" file format anywhere? Any hints appreciated.

[ggn]

Hi there,

 

There are certainly tools to do the opposite of what you ask (gfa->lst) but I can't find anything to do what you wish right now.

 

However, @lp060 has been maintaining GFA Basic (compiler side) and has created his own IDE. I suggest you visit his website (http://gfabasic.net) and probably get in touch with him. I also see in his website that there's a discord so they also can help you out.

 

 

Good luck!

[babyface]

I am already in contact with him. Unfortunately, he can't really help out so far either. I'll probably have to reverse engineer the format.

[ggn]

Well, in that case you might want to check out projects like https://github.com/mmuman/gfalist that convert .gfa files to .lst so you don't start completely from scratch.

[babyface]

I already did check it out. It helped indeed. At this point, I can kinda read a binary GFA file with a hex editor and can recognize where the variable list is and where the code lines begin   I do have an early simple parser which can read a source file, process the header, the variable lists and then all the program lines.

Still, apart from the fact that I need to implement a serialization/deserialization for every single command, there is one part that I don't really understand yet; the 38 4-byte pointers. I guess for your use-case they were not really important and could be ignored, but when I create GFA files, these values need to be correct (I tried setting them to 0; the GFA compiler then hangs when processing the file).

Anyway, your stuff was of great help already, so thanks for that!

Edited July 26, 2022 by babyface