On 4/8/2014 9:07 PM, Jonathan Katz wrote:
Many of the files are for the old word processing
program Magic
Windows. I can boot and read many (but not all) of these files in an
emulator running Magic Windows. The Magic Windows files on the disks
are binary and are in their own weird format; doing things like
running 'strings' against them or opening them in a Word Processing
program produces nothing useful.
You might get away with stripping off the high bit (or adding a high
bit). I can't seem to get out of edit mode in Magic Window to write a
file to check for you...
Is there an emulator for OSX that will emulate a
serial or parallel
port? That way I can "print" from within the Magic Windows program and
the emulator will hopefully spool the output to a text file. That way
I can get this old data out.
All of them emulate serial ports - or at least they emulate printers
directly. Which emulator do you prefer? Virtual II does a good job as
a Mac app; GSport is more unix-like, but has several levels of printer
emulation (text vs. graphics).
Any other ideas?
Extract the individual files using AppleCommander or CiderPress and
operate on them using a language of your choice. I have a pile of
transforms I use to do that with various old word processors socked away
in a project called transformenator:
http://transformenator.sourceforge.net/
I don't have a transform for Magic Window yet, but it would be easy to
add once we know what the binary format is. Or just use perl...