[Coco] Q: Convert TW64 BIN to PC TXT?

[Joel Ewy]

L. Curtis Boyle wrote:
> On Mon, 05 Mar 2007 10:55:55 -0600, Torsten Dittel
> <Torsten at Dittel.info> wrote:
>
>>> Is the problem that you don't have a copy of TW-64 anymore?  Because
>>> I'm
>>> pretty sure you can export it to a plain text file from within TW-64,
>>> either on the CoCo or in an emulator.  Not sure how your German
>>> characters would translate to ASCII though.  But if they showed up in
>>> some form, you could likely just grep them to something useful.
>>> [Digging around in the attic for my TW-64 documentation...]
>>>
>>> There was a separate I/O utility called S.ASC that allowed plain ASCII
>>> disk file reads and writes.
>>
>>
>> Cool, thanks, I'll try it out. I found a disk with the contents:
>>
>> U        BAS 0 B 1
>> TW64     BIN 2 B 5
>> F            2 B 2
>> S        XXX 0 B 2
>> S        BIN 0 B 2
>> S        ASC 0 B 2
>> Z        BIN 2 B 1
>>
>> I'll try that on an emulator.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Torsten
>>
> From what I can remember, S.XXX is the version that actually gets used
> by Telewriter, and you just copy either S.BIN or S.ASC to that file to
> change which way Telewriter will save.
> --L. Curtis Boyle
>
According to the TW-64 manual:

"To do ASCII I/O on disk, then, do the following:  Hit D in the main
menu to get the Disk I/O menu.  Now hit B so you return to BASIC, and
then type RUN "S/ASC".  ...

A new menu will appear, similar to the regular one, but it will say
"ASCII I/O" at the top.  Simply read in, append, or save as you would
with the regular 'Binary' menu. ...

This is all pretty simple, but, if you use both formats, it now becomes
incumbent upon you to keep track of which files are ASCII and which are
BINARY, and which I/O system you are using at the time.  If the Binary
program tries to read an ASCII file or vice versa, you will get an
unmitigated error."

All this suggests to me that if you want to convert the binary format to
ASCII, instead of simply copying the S.ASC over S.XXX, you will have to
start up TW-64 using the binary version of S.XXX, load your file, go to
the Disk menu, load the ASCII version of S.XXX, and then save your file.

JCE

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