[Blindapple] DOS 3.3 disk image text file extractor

Guillem León guilevi2000 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 20 05:55:12 EDT 2017


Hello,
I just wrote this script, mainly as a coding exercise, but it could b useful to some.
It tries to extract all text files from a standard DOS 3.3 disk image into a folder in your hard drive. This is useful if you want to read something like a magazine on your host system and don't want to bother dealing with Cider Press, or if you're not on Windows and thus don't have access to Cider Press.
I wrote this under OS X, which includes the Ruby interpreter, so you won't need any additional setup on that system. On Linux, simply install Ruby with your package manager. On Windows, install Ruby for Windows. If there is enough interest I can try to bundle the Ruby executable or create an one-click executable, not sure if that'll work though.
To extract a disk image, navigate to the folder with both your disk image and the script, and type:
ruby dos33.rb <diskname>
Where <diskname> is the filename of the disk image you want the text files from.
THe script will output a catalog of the disk with all of the files, and will then extract only the text files into a directory with the same name as the disk image (without the extension).
By default, the script will give minimal output. If you want more in-depth info, open dos33.rb in any text editor and change the first line to $debug=true instead of $debug=false. Either that, or look at the code. But don't blame me if it causes any kind of mental trauma. :P
Again, this was mostly an exercise and so it might not work as well as anything serious such as Cider Press, but it seemed to work fine with aTalk and Open Apple.
If you guys want, I can possibly try to figure out Applesoft BASIC files as well, though those are a lot harder because of the way that the Apple compresses them, and the documentation is in a half-readable format.

Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions.

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