TipH1503

NewDeal Hot Tip 1503

General Use

Commodore GEOS and NewDeal

READ81

Jens-Michael Gross and the Geos User Club in Germany offer a program named „read81“ which will read Commodore 1581 floppy disks in an IBM compatible PC disk drive with no additional hardware required. The program is aware of Commodore GEOS files and can show file and content types in the directory. It can convert geoDraw files to PCX format and geoWrite files to plain ASCII format. Other VLIR files can be copied into a well-documented file format for further conversion. Additionally, the program can read and write full 1581 disk images or copy standard C64 files for use in a C64 emulator program.

For more information, visit the web site for the Geos User Club at www.geosuserclub.com

GEOS64CE

Another easy way to convert files from Commodore GEOS to NewDeal or PC format is to use the program from the German Geos User Club named GEOS64CE.ZIP. This program runs on the PC.

Before you can use GEOS64CE, you must use Bill Coleman’s Convert 2.5 program (available from most Commodore BBS’s and online forums) to convert the Commodore GEOS files from the proprietary Commodore GEOS (VLIR) format to regular Commodore SEQuential format.

Next, you move the SEQ files from the Commodore to the PC. This can be done using Big Blue Reader (a commercial program for the Commodore which allows Commodore 1571 or 1581 disk drives to read and write to IBM-type floppy disks)–or you can use a null modem cable to move the files from one machine to the other–or you can upload the files from the Commodore to your local BBS and then download them to the PC.

Third, you run GEOS64CE on the PC to convert the files. It detects what kind of Commodore GEOS file you have brought over and converts it accordingly. Commodore geoWrite files are converted to ASCII, geoPaint and PhotoAlbum files are converted to .PCX for importing to NewDraw or Scrapbook.

Here are some other ways to convert files from the C= to the PC, besides the German converter.

• • There are several third party programs for the Commodore that will convert Commodore geoWrite files to ASCII format. The best of these is probably Wrong Is Write by Joe Buckley from Storm Systems Software. Once the file is in ASCII, it can be moved from the Commodore to the PC and opened with Text File Editor or imported into NewWrite.
  • Jim Collette’s GEOPCX (available on Commodore BBSs or online services) runs on the Commodore and converts geoPaint to a PCX file that can then be moved from the Commodore to the PC and imported to NewDraw. Jim’s program retains the colors from the geoPaint file.
  • Joe Buckley’s MacAttackII will convert a geoPaint document to black-and-white-only .MAC format. The .MAC file can then be moved from the Commodore to the PC, where Graphic Workshop (or any of several other utilities on the PC) can be used to convert the .MAC to a .PCX for importing to NewDraw. A disadvantage of this method, besides the loss of color, is that a .MAC file is not as wide as a geoPaint file, so you cannot capture the entire width of a full page geoPainting.
• • geoPublish files can be transferred to geoDraw, a page at a time, this way: First a geoPublish file page is „printed to a geoPaint file“ by using the paintPAGES or paintOVERLAY printer driver on the Commodore (paintPAGES and paintOVERLAY are created by the PaintDrivers application, which comes with Commodore GEOS 2.0).
    A tip: Do NOT „open“ the resulting geoPaint file before doing the conversion process. Since a geoPublish file can be larger than a geoPaint file, if you „open“ the file in geoPaint, some of the bottom of the page may be lost. If you don’t open the file it will contain ALL of the geoPublish page. Now, you have a geoPaint file that can be converted to PC format by any of the three methods mentioned above: the German converter, Jim Collette’s converter, or MacAttackII.

Last Modified 1 Nov 1999

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