| GFA BASIC | |
|---|---|
 A screenshot of the GFA BASIC editor. | |
| Original author | Frank Ostrowski |
| Initial release | 1986 |
| Final release | 3.6
|
| Operating system | Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows |
| Type | BASIC |
GFA BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language.
History
editGFA BASIC was developed by Frank Ostrowski at "GFA Systemtechnik GmbH" (later "GFA Software"), a German company in Kiel and Düsseldorf, as a proprietary version of his free BASIC implementation, Turbo-Basic XL. GFA is an acronym for "Gesellschaft für Automatisierung" ("Company for Automation"), which gave name to the software. The first GFA BASIC version was released in 1986. In the mid and late 1980s it became popular for the Atari ST, because the Atari ST BASIC shipped with them was more primitive. Ports were later released for the Amiga, MS-DOS, and Windows.
Version 2.0 was the most popular release of GFA BASIC as it offered more advanced features compared to alternatives. GFA BASIC 3.0 added support for user-defined structures and other agglomerated data types. The final released version was 3.6. Around 2002 GFA software ceased all GFA BASIC activities and shut down the mailinglist and website in 2005.[1] Due to official support of GFA BASIC having ceased the user community took over the support and installed an own communication infrastructure.[2][3]
Features and functionality
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This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (August 2025) |
Manual
editSome editions of the GFA manual were printed with black ink on red paper, in an attempt to thwart photocopying and bootlegging. The effectiveness of this tactic was questionable.[4]
Windows version
editThis section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (August 2025) |
Applications
editÉric Chahi wrote a game editor in GFA basic to create his game Another World, including scene design and game scripting; only the game engine (polygon rendering and music) was done in assembler. This editor was used to make all ports of the game, including for consoles and the Collector Edition for Windows released in 2006.[5]
Karsten Köper of Thalion software wrote all the basic game editing software for the "Amberstar" series using GFA Basic.[6]
References
edit- ^ Welcome at GFA Online!
- ^ GFA-BASIC 32 for Windows Archived 2016-04-06 at the Wayback Machine on google.com
- ^ GFA-BASIC 32 for Windows Stuff by Sjouke Hamstra
- ^ "GFA Basic Compiler".
Another point is that it has been printed on a bright red paper, a technique used to stop photocopying. I tested this and found that with a bit of experimentation, the photocopy was easier to read than the original manual!
- ^ Another World Édition Spéciale 15ème Anniversaire for Windows, included making-of. Released by ElektroGames and SdLL (2006).
- ^ "The Thalion Source - Fragen & Antworten -".
External links
edit- GFA Online at the Wayback Machine (archived December 16, 2003)
- GFA-Basic editor - GFA-Basic support for Atari ST, GEM editor for GFA applications, patches for compiler+linker
- GFA-Basic Community
- GFA-BASIC 32 for Windows — Free Community version
- GFA-BASIC 32 (FAN-SITE) on YouTube — A fan hosted YouTube channel to promote the fun of coding.
- X11-Basic — a free cross-platform BASIC with very similar syntax, including GUI functionality
- Atari GFA Basic 3 (LST format) to Java 1.0 converter
- RUN! Software — comprehensive IDE, application builder, run-only interpreter, library with new features and bugfixes (site German, documents English)
- https://web.archive.org/web/20170304121818/http://www.vistoso.de/jh/programmer.html Code and Downloads for Windows 16-bit and 32-bit (German)
- https://github.com/codeprof/GFA-Basic-to-VB.Net-converter Converter program to convert GFA-WIN 16-Bit sources to VB.Net
