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Post by hydrophilic on Feb 14, 2016 2:50:37 GMT
Maybe Google sucks ash... or maybe I don't know how to leverage the power of Google, but... I spent about an hour searching for Windows/DOS program that will convert PETSCII text file into ASCII without success. Well, I did find a program on CSDB. But after download, it refused to run because .NET 4.0 was not installed. WTF?? Now I am bamboozled! PETSCII->ASCII is one of those programs that should run in pure DOS mode... it should not require .NET, or DIRECT X, or OLE, or ODBC, etc. (Is it just me, or does .NET sound like OVERKILL?) I trust you folks know I could write a quick hack in CBM-BASIC in a few minutes... and I could write an C128-ML version in less than an hour... and I could write GENERIC Windows port in an hour or two (i.e, Windows 95+). And I will if necessary... BUT... Doesn't something like this already exist? It seems REALLY strange if not... |
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Post by pinacolada on Feb 14, 2016 3:15:28 GMT
Are the files in a disk image or separate .seq files (as extracted from a disk image, perhaps?)
Pete Schepers' excellent 64COPY utility <http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~schepers/personal.html> can do what you want, regardless of the answer. It's a pure DOS program. Once you start it with 64COPY.EXE, you'll see a two-pane file manager (like Norton Commander, et al) and you can dive into a disk image or select a PETSCII file with Shift-F9. It will then ask you what the source of the original file is, and what you'd like to convert the output into, and where.
Barring that, NovaTerm 9.6 (a telecommunications program) has an option built in which handles converting PETSCII to ASCII, too. Let me know if you want more information about it.
And yeah, having .NET installed is a bit much.
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Post by sjgray on Feb 16, 2016 3:23:27 GMT
Have you tried the PETCAT.EXE dos utility that is included in VICE?
If that doesn't work let me know and I can whip something up for my CBMXfer program (which doesn't use .NET! ;-) ).
Steve
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Post by cbmguy on Feb 16, 2016 16:44:06 GMT
For what's it's worth, I've just used ZED 128 and used the options (C=o to set input to petscii and print to ASCII or save to ASCII). To print as ASCII text (from in VICE Emulation), the generic print out is called vice.prt which is just a simple text file.
**Oops... For go to mention the VICE emulation from which to print from in the last sentence... my bad--sometimes I think faster than I write.
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Post by sjgray on Feb 16, 2016 17:58:30 GMT
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Post by hydrophilic on Feb 17, 2016 3:04:00 GMT
You guys are all totally AWESOME! Really, I was only expecting a response like "hey n00b, use program X"  Thanks pinacoloda, sjgray , and cbmguy for telling me how to leverage the power of existing apps to solve my problem.  Another "leverage" method is to use VICE printer emulation... use something like OPEN 4,7,4:CMD4:LIST with VICE setting of Printer/File/ASCII... I knew about the VICE method before my original post... and I agree with you guys, about leveraging power of "other" software. But it seems to me, there REALLY, REALLY, should be a simple (dedicated) program for PETSCII->ASCII translation... maybe I am too naïve?
ANYWAY, I wrote a dedicated PETSCII translator program (just like I said I would in my original post). You can download the Windows binary here (it does not have a normal EXE extension because some web servers [err, Google] are quite lame... it will run just fine without an extension, but feel free to rename it with an EXE extension if it makes you happy ). You can download the C++ source code (with test files) here... [the source uses MFC, so a little work will be needed for a *NIX port]. The important things (my 100% biased opinion) are: - Input from lower/upper PETSCII, or
- Input from upper/graphic PETSCII,
- Work on a single file (typical), or
- Work on all files in a directory (batch processing)
- Translate to any of 4 character sets:
- ASCII
- ISO-8859-1
- Windows-1252
- Unicode (16-bit)
- Encode with any of 4 methods:
- Byte-encoding (any translated character set except Unicode [thus, ASCII / ISO-8859-1 / Win-1252])
- Word-encoding (little-endian... aka UTF-16LE... ANY translated character set)
- Word-encoding (big-endian... aka UTF-16BE... ANY translated character set)
- Variable-encoding (aka UTF-8... ANY translated character set)
- Output with any of 4 "new line" formats:
- CR (for CP/M, Mac OS9-, etc.)
- LF (for Linux, Mac OS10+, UNIX, etc.)
- LF+CR (rare)
- CR+LF (for DOS, Windows, etc.)
During this project, I found a few more Unicode values that will map to PETSCII codes... thus I have updated 2 pages on my website which might be useful: PETSCII (lower/upper CBM font), and ASCII-X (upper/graphic CBM font).
The binary download (see link above) runs on Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows ME, Windows 98 and Windows 95... and it don't care what version of .NET, or DIRECT X that you have (not) installed.
This new software solved my original problem, and I'm sharing it with everyone in the hope that it will allow more software to be written for CBM machines...
WARNING: (I almost forgot!)... because the program was designed for batch processing, it WILL overwrite any existing output file, so be careful! (With great power comes great responsibility... ) |
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