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

[L. Curtis Boyle]

On Mon, 05 Mar 2007 11:35:17 -0600, Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:

> 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

     Yes, that is true. I was just explaining what the S.XXX is for (which  
is the default save/load method you want to normally use).

-- 
L. Curtis Boyle