N1LAF
08-29-2009, 02:53 PM
I took the opportunity to see what was available for Commodore 64 emulators on PC's since seeing an avatar with the C64 screen. The result was finding an emulator that is quite good, excellent actually.
www.ccs64.com (http://www.ccs64.com)
Version 3.7
What I like about this emulator is that I can drag drive images into the emulator window, and it will load & execute. Cool stuff.
Years ago, I came across a computer shop with an old 1541 floppy drive in the display window, just for display. I asked if I could borrow for a week, which i did. With Star Commander and a make shift cable, I was able to download almost all my C64 floppies to the PC in .D64 drive image files. I used a word processor on the C64 called WordPro by Steve Punter during college, but unable to read my old files since I could not copy this copy-protected program to a drive image.... until now.
A few years ago, I wrote a program in LabVIEW to map and read the .D64 image files. All the programs and types has been identified, and the chain of Track/Sector can be followed.
Last night I searched again for conversion of the WordPro files into ascii text, and came across this obscure reference concerning SPEEDSCRIPT and file storage, that SPEEDSCRIPT files were saved in screen print 'poke' codes. Resurrecting my old program, and loading the WordPro files, I decoded a couple of the hex bytes into screen codes, and son of a gun, WordPro did the same thing.
This morning, I modified D64_Manager program I wrote years ago to select the file, collect the entire file into a byte stream, and convert from the raw byte stream to the screen codes, and now I have converted my old college papers back into ascii text, where I can copy and reproduce into Word documents and PDF's.
I have about 40-50 papers, it was great fun and challenge to see this through. If there is anyone else that would like this program, let me know here and I will make it available.
More Commodore 64 links:
http://www.c64.com/
http://www.computerbrains.com/
http://www.lemon64.com
http://www.viceteam.org/
http://www.c64hq.com/
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Systems/C ... /Hardware/ (http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Systems/Commodore/Hardware/)
http://sta.c64.org
www.ccs64.com (http://www.ccs64.com)
Version 3.7
What I like about this emulator is that I can drag drive images into the emulator window, and it will load & execute. Cool stuff.
Years ago, I came across a computer shop with an old 1541 floppy drive in the display window, just for display. I asked if I could borrow for a week, which i did. With Star Commander and a make shift cable, I was able to download almost all my C64 floppies to the PC in .D64 drive image files. I used a word processor on the C64 called WordPro by Steve Punter during college, but unable to read my old files since I could not copy this copy-protected program to a drive image.... until now.
A few years ago, I wrote a program in LabVIEW to map and read the .D64 image files. All the programs and types has been identified, and the chain of Track/Sector can be followed.
Last night I searched again for conversion of the WordPro files into ascii text, and came across this obscure reference concerning SPEEDSCRIPT and file storage, that SPEEDSCRIPT files were saved in screen print 'poke' codes. Resurrecting my old program, and loading the WordPro files, I decoded a couple of the hex bytes into screen codes, and son of a gun, WordPro did the same thing.
This morning, I modified D64_Manager program I wrote years ago to select the file, collect the entire file into a byte stream, and convert from the raw byte stream to the screen codes, and now I have converted my old college papers back into ascii text, where I can copy and reproduce into Word documents and PDF's.
I have about 40-50 papers, it was great fun and challenge to see this through. If there is anyone else that would like this program, let me know here and I will make it available.
More Commodore 64 links:
http://www.c64.com/
http://www.computerbrains.com/
http://www.lemon64.com
http://www.viceteam.org/
http://www.c64hq.com/
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Systems/C ... /Hardware/ (http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Systems/Commodore/Hardware/)
http://sta.c64.org