George L. Rachor Jr. wrote: http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008, Ray Arachelian wrote: . . . and the printer output feeding straight into the Automatic Document Feeder of the OCR scanner?

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 03:52:51PM -0400, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: Both ways. Barefoot. In the snow. Uphill both ways. etc. etc. Actually, I wrote some 6502 asm to bit bang out the game port data, ttl rs232 ;-). It isn't that hard. - Diane -- - db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db

On 16 Jul 2008 at 16:56, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: Has anyone used a camera and software to transfer data from a system's CRT display? I've come close to doing that once or twice, but never actually tried it. I found that I could get pretty fine program control on a status LED and taped a phototransistor over it and sent the data as a serial stream. It worked better than I'd thought it would. Cheers, Chuck

Diane Bruce wrote: 8-) This actually wasn't all that long ago. Certainly recent enough for drum-scanners to be somewhat more common than they used to be. Surprisingly, there are still companies out there running Bull DPS9000-class mainframes. Not many, but one here and there. These people had been doing their data transfers in and out of their DPS8 box by tape, but their last tape drive had just died, and so they decided to rid themselves of the machine. However, they had some data they hadn't backed up, and they wanted it in an IBM format. I just drum-scanned into TIFF and used OCR software on the PS/2 to do the heavy lifting. I used the PS/2 because 3270/A cards are a dime a dozen and I happen to have a rather large pile of PS/2 equipment lying around. Peace... Sridhar

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 04:18:26PM -0400, Diane Bruce wrote: Did that to move Infocom game sectors from an Apple II to a C-64. It was a bit rough, but with both CPUs bit-banging away at 1200 baud, it took a while. In the end, though, the operation was a success. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 17-Jul-2008 at 03:40 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -87.7 F (-66.5 C) Windchill -123.7 F (-86.5 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 8.2 kts Grid 59 Barometer 675.8 mb (10787 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 09:34:45PM -0700, Eric Smith wrote: I was testing the Spartan Mimic, a bolt-on-the-side Apple II "emulator" for the C-64 (it was really more of a headless Apple clone that could run parasitically from the C-64). At one point, to show that things wouldn't lock up, mostly, I was running two simultaneous Infocom games, one on the C-64 CPU and one on the Mimic CPU, then switching between them with the keyboard shortcuts while each one loaded the results faster than the C-64 side, but that's hardly a revalation. I've done similar things with slightly different platforms (I wasn't ever into the Atari universe, and I only had an Apple II because one of my early jobs was writing children's software for it - I pretty much stayed with Commodore from the days of the 8K PET all the way through until I bought an Amiga 4000 in NZ and refitted the PSU to work in the U.S.) One unusual platform for my game file transformations was VMS. I got the ITF V3 interpreter working on the 11/750 running VMS 4.6 at work in the early 1990s, so I needed to snarf game files from my original C-64 disks. That was a chore. I forget exactly how I did it, but it probably involved writing a program to read the sectors in game order (slightly dependent on exactly which of the three C-64 interpreters was on the game disk), then pushing them up a dial-up pipe to work (I never brought my C-64 in... it was all done remotely) then reassembling the fragments into a working game file. I only did that for a few games (Zork I, II, III, Starcross, and Planetfall, IIRC). Pascal was never a language I liked to use, but I did a lot of game file fiddling with stuff I wrote in C. Unfortunate. I've seen it (and have a copy). My similar project was to reverse-engineer the first version of the C-64 interpreter, as shipped with Zork I, into mostly-commented source that compiles back to the original binary. I started back in the late 1980s, then dropped it for a while, since assembly development on the C-64 is really a pain, but then when VICE matured enough to be useful, I picked up the project again, but this time using a SPARCstation as my emulation and development platform. Editing source on a workstation display then running the binary without having to cut floppies sped things along at a dizzying rate by comparison. So about 10 years ago, I was able to run the C-64 code on a VIC-20 (with the interpreter living up in ROM cartridge space). Just this past month, I finally figured out two bugs - one zero-page-related, one 40-column-related, so that now, I can run Infocom games on a PET! I first ran across Zork when it was fresh and new on the TRS-80. Since I'd played a few Scott Adams games (writing an interpreter for the PET on Supermon before I had a disk drive or assembler), the richness of the interaction was stunning. I read the articles that are now easy to find from Creative Computing and the IEEE journal (courtesy of the nearby college engineering library), but was thwarted at playing them myself until late 1983 when the games were put out for the C-64. The only practical application for my porting the games to the PET is to prove to myself, if noone else, that they _could_ have supported the platform if they'd decided there would be enough sales to warrant (which there probably would not have been, given the immense cost of a 32K PET and a 4040 disk drive when Infocom was just starting out - not so many folks had a system that decked out). Obviously, by 1982-1983, when they would have been writing the C-64 interpreter, it had already established itself as an affordable platform with a large userbase. I've written plenty of Infocom-related tools over the years (fortunately in my case, I still have +90% of what I've written still around), but one thing I've never done is to write an interpreter from scratch. The closest I've come is to help Mike Reilly, author of ElfOS, debug a V3 interpreter for the 1802. Since I've owned an Elf since the late 1970s, it was a real thrill to port the games to that platform - another case of "could have done it if they'd wanted to" for one of the machines that shaped my formative years. Of course, it's much easier for us now with modern tools and modern understanding of 1970s architectures, so what was once a major commercial development undertaking is now a hobby project of a few weeks. The evolution of my C-64 interpreter reverse-engineering project is a clear demonstration of that - going from 40-column poking around to a nearly instant edit-compile-test cycle on modern hardware, aided by web-based hyperlinked ROM listings. A completely different environment, but in the end, it all just comes down to the ">" prompt. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 17-Jul-2008 at 04:40 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -87.2 F (-66.2 C) Windchill -118.7 F (-83.7 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 6.3 kts Grid 59 Barometer 675.6 mb (10795 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

This is probably a " Tony " question but I'll take answers from anyone in the know.... How can you remove the " Kapton " looking covering off of a flex circuit without jacking-up the circuit traces underneath so as to repair same ?? Heat sorta works but makes a huge mess .... This crap is used in many of my HP calculators and some old computers. Thanks for any advice !! Best regards, Steven

A dremel tool and a sand attachment does wonders. It grinds enough the plastic to expose the metal part, which you can solder or use conductive paint.