DraftSight crashed while dimensioning a drawing. The dimensions quit appearing while I was drawing them. Then the three or four last commands I tried appeared all at once, then all drawing elements turned from color to black and white, and then it crashed and closed. 

Now the the file size is 1/4 of what it was, and will not recover. 

I found the autosave back up file from 10 minutes earlier, but can figure out how to open it. Its a .DS\\\$ file type. 

Any ideas?