Opening non-Affinity files

[bdieges]

Another Cable 3

I have a bunch of files, similar to the one attached, that are drawings, I think they were done in Deneba Canvas over 20 years ago, that is drawing program although you could do a lot of things with it.  However, I no longer have that program and can't figure out how to open them.  Any ideas? I have added .svg, .eps and and several others, but they are still unopenable.

[Wosven]

Perhaps you can try those: https://winworldpc.com/product/deneba-canvas/5x

Usually, if you didn't export to usual and known formats, the files you have are in this application's format, and it'll be difficult to open.

[bdieges]

Thank you for the link, I am on a MAC.

[IanSG]

10 hours ago, bdieges said:

Thank you for the link, I am on a MAC.

The link is for the Mac version.  That said, I'm not sure if the download is still there.

[R C-R]

10 hours ago, bdieges said:

Thank you for the link, I am on a MAC.

The link includes a version 5 download for Macs but unless you have an old Mac capable of running the 'classic' pre-OS X version of the Mac OS, don't bother -- I am almost certain it will not run on any version of OS X/macOS.

The current owner of Canvas makes a Mac version that I think will open the old Deneba format files but I am not certain of that -- maybe check out the free trial to see if it does, or contact their tech support.

You can read about the history of Canvas here.

FWIW, in the early 1990's Deneba Canvas 3.x was my mainstay graphics app. I bought & immediately regretted buying version 5.0 for Macs when it was released -- 3.x ran on Apple's old QuickDraw technology & was quite fast even on the underpowered PPC Macs of that era. Version 5 ran on the more modern Quartz technology but required so much processing power that it was practically useless even on the most powerful PPC Macs available back then.

Not long after that I got a too-good-to-pass-up deal on Macromedia Freehand. After a lot of experimentation I managed to export my Canvas docs to a format Freehand could read, not perfectly preserving everything but worth it for my most important stuff. Of course, I had to do the same thing all over again when Adobe effectively killed Freehand. I could only do because I still have an old Intel Mac that can run Freehand MX in 'classic' mode, so I could re-save some of those files in a Freehand version that AD could import.

So if you have access to an old Mac you may be able to do something similar; otherwise I think your only option is to try the current Mac version & see if you can export from that to some format Affinity can open.

[IanSG]

5 minutes ago, R C-R said:

So if you have access to an old Mac

And if you do, Canvas is available here.

[bdieges]

Thank you for the detailed information.  I was an avid Canvas user, and then went straight to Illustrator.  I am worried that now that they are now just selling subscriptions to "the cloud"  I may run into problems with it too.  I did have to change some Javascript to get it to run on my computer.