Problems viewing source code from an .rb file

As long as the underlying operating system, of course. Windows is a no-go and between mac and Linux you might want to check for ruby version and path, just in case.

From Tonio Loewald, the “other” guy working with Barry in those days (they did the great Prince of Destruction that, sadly, may be too hard to port, according to discussions I had with Tonio earlier this year, and for which discussions CrossBasic may have come to be):

Realbasic and Visual Basic

It’s a great read, in the sense that the very early history of RealBasic is usually nebulous.

The sad part is that this post comes where, 20 years after original inception, the stupid “It’s based on Visual Basic” crap keeps coming up.

Off-Topic: Prince of Destruction was a marvelous and gorgeous indie RPG from 1995, made by Tonio and Andrew Barry, original author of what would eventually become CrossBasic, RealBasic, RealStudio and then Xojo. Hence Tonio’s twitter account is “@podperson

Hi, just posting to say “Thank you!”

I had some old .rb files from using RealBasic in 2003. (I do not know the version.)

On my Mac today, the OS suspected they were Ruby Source files. I could open them with Xcode, but they were a garbled mess. Similarly if I opened them with text editors.

I found this thread. Upon changing the suffix to “.rbp” instead of “.rb”, the file could open in Xojo. Lots of errors and things that were no longer features, sure, but I was able to see my old notes, classes, and code.

The tricky part is that Xojo’s hierarchy automatically put things in places that I couldn’t find… so I guess I’ll have to learn Xojo if I want to do a deep dive into what on earth I was thinking back in 2003…

Anyway, thank you to all the forum participants who chimed in on this thread.

-D