[Blindapple] Lots of material from Raised Dot Computing

[Jayson Smith]

Hi,

To answer a few of your questions.

I've found the Braille Edit disks to be a bit buggy, but there's a 
simple reason. In the days of Braille Edit, Raised Dot liked to make the 
disk volume number the same as the Braille Edit version. So if you were 
cataloging a version 2.45 disk, instead of the disk volume being 254, it 
would be 245. This seemed like a nice thing to do, but in retrospect, it 
caused all kinds of problems when the disks were imaged. The workaround 
seems to be probably to use CiderPress to transfer all files from 
Braille Edit disks to new disks that have the Raised Dot modified copy 
of ProntoDOS on them. This is much easier said than done, as obviously 
the DOS INIT command on Raised Dot disks doesn't write DOS to 
initialized disks.

As for Bette, I don't know much about it, but it appears to be 
Braille-Edit Textbook Transcribing Edition. Once BEX was on the market, 
BETTE became outdated, so RDC developed a companion product for BEX 
called TranscriBEX.

If you launch index.html from the root directory of the CD directory 
structure, you'll be guided to lots of information including 
documentation, newsletters, etc. You'll miss a lot if you just use the 
HTML documents, but it does make finding some things easier.

Hope that helps.
Jayson

On 11/10/2013 12:29 PM, Kyle wrote:
> A real treasure trove indeed. Thanks. I do have a couple of questions
> though.
>
> First of all, it looks as though there may be something wrong with the
> latest version of Braille Edit on the CD. It appears to start, but
> attempting to load Textalker is failing with an I/O ERROR. I wonder what
> in the world could possibly cause this type of problem on a disk image
> that is not a real floppy disk.
>
> along with Braille Edit and BEX, I have found something called Bette. I
> can't seem to find any information on what this is, but it appears to
> look much like Braille Edib, but with a newer version of Textalker. The
> menus look very similar. Does anyone know what this could be?
>
> Also, there is some kind of DOS disk called master.dsk. It only has an
> empty HELLO program, but booting it and brunning Textalker from another
> disk, I can't get more than a single disk catalog. The CATALOG command
> gives me a complete disk catalog, but then it crashes and dumps me into
> the monitor. Even more strange is the fact that the catalog header is
> the standard
>
> DISK VOLUME 254
>
> rather than any of the variants like Pronto-DOS, David DOS or
> DiversiDOS. Any idea what this DOS master could be, and additionally,
> why it's on the Raised Dot CD, but is incompatible with Textalker?
> ~Kyle
> http://kyle.tk/