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Graphic Interpretation - The Visitor
by Bruce Thomas

I had a visitor from France yesterday. Now, for some readers this wouldn't be newsworthy. I imagine there are even a fair number of GO64! subscribers who live in France. I live in Western Canada so my visitor was a fair distance from home.

I admit, visitors to my home normally wouldn't show up in a magazine article about Commodore computers and GEOS. The reason for this visit, and what was done during it, brought up many things that warrant discussion here.

My visitor was not a stranger. He had lived in Canada for 30 years and retired back to his homeland 7 years ago. He used to be a member of our local User Group and decided to look me up on his return visit to help solve some GEOS problems. He brought four of his GEOS disks with him.

Start Me Up

Two of these were original boot disks that he uses regularly to boot GEOS 128. Now, this should set bells and whistles ringing everywhere. The number one rule of GEOS, even though V2.0 comes with a Backup Boot Disk, has got to be 'protect your original boot disks and make copies for everyday use'.

The GEOS copy protection scheme means that you can't just use any disk copy software to create usable copies. There are a number of options still available including Maverick (available from Centsible Software www.centsible.com with all parameter disks for $29.95) and geoMakeBoot (available from CMD www.cmdweb.com for $12.95).

Maverick lets you create boot disks on 5 1/4" media while geoMakeBoot lets you create a boot disk on any media format supported by GEOS. Wheels is another option and it even comes with its own Boot Disk maker program. I used Maverick to make Boot Disk duplicates for my visitor.

Take a number

The next problem that my visitor had was the serialization of his two boot disks. One disk was V1.4 of GEOS 128 and the second one was V2.0. When he installed his V2.0 he answered the question about previously installed applications wrong and ended up with two serial numbers.

Now, there are a number of ways, including Maverick, to modify or strip the serial number from Applications so they will work with different boot disks. Since my visitor did not have any add-on packages he was only having trouble with geoWrite.

Yes, geoWrite is coded to the boot disk it was first installed to but its data files are not, so you are right to ask where the problem is. Simply use the V2.0 version of geoWrite to open the files created by the earlier version and go from there. This brought up the next issue.

Department of Redundancy Department

My visitor only has one disk drive - a 1571. This is great as the 331 KB storage space allows him to save a lot of files to one disk. This is not so great as it makes it harder and slower to copy files from one disk to another.

Basically, if you are using GEOS you should have more than one disk drive. Disk Drives can be picked up today for very low prices. For reasons we will cover later your system should include a 3 1/2" Disk Drive (1581 or FD-2000).

Not only are physical drives easy to find but there are a multitude of RAM Devices to choose from, and many of them can be found on the used market. The speed increase you get from a RAM Device is a real boost to your productivity. Get the most RAM that you can which means a 16 MB CMD RAMLink (get the optional Battery Backup unit while you're at it).

Since his original geoWrite work disk had V1.4 of geoWrite on it my visitor was booting from his original GEOS 128 Boot Disk to access those files. To use his V2.0 geoWrite work disk he would boot from his new boot disk. The simple fix was to delete the original geoWrite and copy his new geoWrite to the original work disk. If you are using a single disk drive you need to know how to copy files between disks or face the same dilemma as my visitor.

My visitor also reported frequent troubles booting his GEOS System disks. Both of his disks booted fine on my system so`I suspect he may be having some drive alignment or dirty head issues. Having a second drive gives you options when equipment failure occurs.

PC Compatibility

The last thing that I did for my visitor was take his geoWrite files and convert them so they could be read on a PC. In order to make the information readable by PC programs it is necessary to convert the files to TRUE ASCII format.

ASCII is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This format ensures that characters are identified by a pre-determined value so that any computer program with ASCII capability can read the data.

By nature our Commodore computers use their own character codes (known as PET-ASCII) as well as their own disk format (although the disks are the same physical size as PCs use). These differences make transferring data to another computer a bit of a challenge, to say the least.

With the help of special software we can read and write PC formatted disks on our 1571 and 1581 (or FD) drives. Since most PCs these days don't have a 5 1/4" Disk Drive it is a requirement to use the 3 1/2" format if you want to follow this procedure.

For many years our only option for reading from, or writing to, PC disks was Big Blue Reader (BBR) from SOGWAP Software - and it still does a fantastic job. These days we also have more options including geoDOS and MegaPatch3. geoDOS lets you make use of the 1.44 MB 3 1/2" PC floppies (including formatting) while BBR only utilizes 720 KB floppies.

Prior to the transfer we must convert our GEOS files into ASCII format. Again, we have a number of options including WrongIsWrite (WiW) and geoDOS. WiW, by Joe Buckley, lets you convert any version of geoWrite file from/to ASCII, PET-ASCII, etc. as well as other useful GEOS functions such as changing fonts and stripping Carriage Returns among other things. WiW is available, as a commercial product, on the Storm Systems disk and also on Dale Sidebottom's Laser Lover's Disk. There are also a few earlier versions that are PD. geoDOS handles the conversion as the file is written to the PC disk so no intermediate steps are needed.

Another item that needs to be mentioned follows along with this translation theme. Since our Commodores use different codes than ASCII does for each letter you must name your files in all uppercase letters prior to the transfer`(this then shows up as all lowercase on the PC). Again, geoDOS handles this automatically.

Also keep in mind that older PC operating systems had limitations on the names they could accept. These limits said a file name could be only twelve characters long at most (8 for the name, a dot and a 3 character extension). In this case name your file with a '.TXT' extension to identify it as an ASCII Text file to the PC Operating System.

Until next time, enGEOy your Commodore!