paradox

Trying to read Paradox .sc and .sc2 code files


There is a very old program that a client uses that was written in paradox for DOS. It runs on the paradox runtime version 4.0 in DOS for the whole program. Right now, it is run in a virtualized instance of Windows 98, that runs it from the command prompt. The client is interested in migrating the code to something that will run on modern hardware.

The problem that I am having is in being able to actually read the underlying code. These are especially the files with the extension ".sc" or ".sc2". There are, of course, the database files, themselves, but they aren't really a problem for me. According to another answer on the question: Paradox database file, the ".sc" files are script files, which is what I would expect as you launch the program by opening one of them in the paradox runtime.

Does anyone have any insight as to how I can open/read these script files? They won't read in any kind of text editor that I can find, even after trying numerous encoding options.


Solution

  • Paradox was split into two: the development app and the runtime app. I would guess you would need the paradox 4 development app and the source files to read the source. Runtime was intended to run a compiled version of your program which does not necessarily include the source code.

    I am basing this on how paradox 5 for windows works. The dev system had the source code which compiled down to a dll (without the source code) which you could run in runtime. Runtime could also run the source code as well so you might get lucky with your .sc file.

    For reference I have never come across any scripts with those extensions in any version of paradox from 5 on so it may predate windows 3.1 lol.