How to transfer Telewriter files?

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snarkhunter
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How to transfer Telewriter files?

Post by snarkhunter »

Hello all,

I may have already asked you, but I cannot remember any longer now.
I do have a number of letters exchanged in the 80's with friends through the disk version of Telewriter. Those have been stored on disks and were converted to ".vdk" files many years ago, but I would like to know how I may now transfer those to PC text documents.

... any ideas or tips, please?

Thank you very much in advance!
Lionel
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robcfg
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Re: How to transfer Telewriter files?

Post by robcfg »

Extracting the files from the disk images is easy, then we’d need to convert them into a modern day readable format.

I don’t know how difficult would that be, but if you don’t mind sharing a disk image, we could take a look at it.
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snarkhunter
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Re: How to transfer Telewriter files?

Post by snarkhunter »

Thank you very much for your quick reply. I was thinking along the lines of printing the documents to some dummy output media which could be on the PC side, but maybe that is not possible.

I'll try to retrieve my saved disks and post one here, to begin with.

But thank you very much already for your offer to help.
These are letters from either myself of a friend of mine who passed away about 20 years ago, so I would really be happy if I could save those and store them as readable PC files...
sixxie
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Re: How to transfer Telewriter files?

Post by sixxie »

You could certainly try printing it to a file from xroar (-lp-file filename). Might have to edit out control codes, etc.
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robcfg
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Re: How to transfer Telewriter files?

Post by robcfg »

Also, MAME emulates printers and outputs the results as pdf files.

Not sure though if there’s any yet compatible with the Dragon, but worth checking out.

Pernod70 may be able to shed some light.
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snarkhunter
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Re: How to transfer Telewriter files?

Post by snarkhunter »

Thank you very much for the tips. I had the '-lp' redirection in mind, but was not sure it could work with printing from software rather than from the OS. Will have to try that and see how it works!
sixxie
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Re: How to transfer Telewriter files?

Post by sixxie »

Oh yes - for a Dragon, the parallel port itself is emulated, so anything using it should work.

For the CoCo bitbanger it just hooks the ROM, so it's not so universal.

..ciaran
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snarkhunter
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Re: How to transfer Telewriter files?

Post by snarkhunter »

I've been trying to setup the latest available version of XRoar (0.36.2 for Win10/64 bits) using the following startup template:

C:\...\Downloads\Dragon\xroar-0.36.2-w64\xroar.exe -lp-file xroarprt
with '...' above being the actual part of the path for my User.

The usual 'ddos10.rom' file is in the same folder as the main executable.
Then, when trying to start the application (my computer is running 64-bit Win10), I'm getting the well-known full-of-garbage screen.

Do you have any idea what may cause this, please?
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Re: How to transfer Telewriter files?

Post by sixxie »

You have the machine ROMs too, not just DragonDOS?
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snarkhunter
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Re: How to transfer Telewriter files?

Post by snarkhunter »

I am now trying on my personal PC (XP-based), which contains a full installation of the main Dragon emulators.

Here's my latest attempt:
C:\Donnees\Dragon\XRoar\xroar.exe -machine dragon32 -keymap-fr -kbd-translate -lp-file XRoar-prtoutput.txt

Yet that does not work any better, although I am able to start emulation, then Telewriter Disk, then load in one of the files I would like "printed out".

My current issue seems to be with the keyboard emulation since I'm unable to find the emulated Dragon's <CLEAR> key on the keyboard of my portable PC. According to the documentation for Xroar, it should be the PC's <Home> key, but that obviously won't work. And Dragon's <BREAK> seems to be allocated to <Esc> since pressing that one will erase the first character in an open TW document.

So my current question would be: Where is the <CLEAR> key in an emulated Dragon using the above setup?
Last edited by snarkhunter on Sun May 22, 2022 2:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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