If you still have a MAC plus handy you can experiment by making short programs and viewing them in hex.
You can build up a translation dictionary that way. I've done that for other Basics in the past. You show 16 bit values, be careful they are sometimes byte swapped. The original encoding is most likely bytes and not words in size. Dwight ________________________________ From: cctalk <cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org> on behalf of Michael Hunter via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, June 6, 2017 8:32:14 PM To: cct...@classiccmp.org Subject: Recovered a .bas file from my old Mac Plus Hey folks, I hope all is well. Curiosity got the better of me and I sent in an EMAC external HDD I had for my old Mac Plus in for recovery. I'm happy to report that the recovery was a success. Now I'm struggling to figure out how to get at the old content :) The biggest prize was finding piano.bas, which is a BASIC piano program I wrote that (if I recall correctly) allows you to set how many notes to have between octaves. Anyway, the .bas file is not plaintext, but I can see strings in it. Here are the first few bytes: 00000000: f900 1b00 3aaf e84f 6e65 2046 7275 636b ....:..One Fruck 00000010: 6564 2075 7020 7069 616e 6f00 000c 0061 ed up piano....a 00000020: 3af8 823a 20f8 8300 001e 009a 2022 5374 :..: ....... "St I remember watching a documentary saying that source code used to be encoded / compressed. Anybody have any suggestions on how to decode it? Sorry if it's poor form to put this in the body but here's the whole file: begin 644 piano.bas M^0`;`#JOZ$]N92!&<G5C:V5D('5P('!I86YO```,`&$Z^((Z(/B#```>`)H@ M(E-T87)T:6YG('!I=&-H("@T-#`I(CMA```;`)H@(DAA;&8@<W1E<',@=7`@ M*#`I(CMB```8`)H@(DQO;W`_('DL;B`H;BDB.V<D```1`)@@8>H1()<@&P`` M`'<``!(`8CIDZF'N$_`H8N\/#"D```L`^,`@9"P@$P``$P"4('/J$2#E(!P3 MB#JI(',```D`9>IE[!(``!$`F"!EZA0@ER`;````9@``$0"8(&7J&""7(!L` M``!F```1`)@@9>H9()<@&P```&<```D`8NIB[!,```L`ER`;````8@``"P!F M.F+J8NP2```+`)<@&P```&(``!<`9SH@F"!G).HB>2(@ER`;````:```"P"7 M(!L```!A```*`&@Z(&+J$0``"P"7(!L```!B```+`'<Z8>H<`;@```L`ER`; (````8@`````` ` end Also, again sorry if this is poor form, but I'm looking to find a good home for the Mac Plus, if you know somebody in the Bay Area who's interested please let me know. Thanks! Mike PS I'm interested in other formats I'm seeing too (.ht, some extensionless thing that might be MacPaint), any pointers are appreciated!