I agree with Tony. Let's redefine the problem.

What format is the Pick data you're trying to get? It certainly isn't
on the install disks.

If it's not a file save or t-dump, then you could probably write a
program to read the native files and parse out the field markers.



On Aug 18, 8:25*pm, Tony Gravagno <nos... (AT) nospam (DOT) invalid> wrote:

On 19 Aug, 07:10, Douglas Tatelman <doug... (AT) pickteam (DOT) com> wrote:
Well, the original poster, Malcolm, is the one with the data and he
hasn't answered my question as to whether he has a t-dump or just the
AP/DOS volumes.
I have only a personal challenge in train to get an AP/DOS system
running, having lost the images of the system I had running in Win2K
eight years ago. If I happen to achieve that before he extracts his
data any other way, he may be able to do the same to retrieve his
data.
I'm not devoting much time to this and I'm already using "Personal
Universe", OpenQM and an evaluation D3 Linux (from Tigerlogic UK,
thanks!) for my real mv experimentation work.
Thanks for the VFD and FIRM leads. I'll try them soon. Today's efforts
with physical floppies came to nought either because all the ones I
have are too worn or because the drive firmware is too modern, even my
Compaq 1999 laptop. Some of the errors from the contemporary
"Teledisk" utility seem to suggest the latter. I also had a go with
Virtualbox v2 which can read and write raw floppies OK but is terribly
buggy after using v3!
So I still have an AP/DOS licenced system but I can't load its ABS or
data floppy-tapes.

As I said in the original post, I have all the DOS files which AP/DOS
used. I recovered them from a ZIP file copy which I made years ago.

I just thought that there might be a simple way to patch a Windows
file (now that I located the CONFIG.SYS file, that looks like the best
best) to run the old AP/DOS system on Vista. I didn't really want to
make a career out of fixing the problem and recovering the data

Thanks for all your help and suggestions

Malcolm

On 20 Aug, 08:43, Malcolm Bull <calderd... (AT) sky (DOT) com> wrote:
OK, Malcolm, I now have your solution.
AP/DOS runs fine in WinXP/Vista/WIn7 as long as you use the
PICKMON.EXE which came with patch M4 which was to enable running in
Windows 95.
The CONFIG.SYS errors come out of the older PICKMON.EXE, which is
160,948 bytes while the new one is 160,977.
Luckily it is downloadable at ftp://ftp.tigerlogic.com/pub/DOS/5.2...es/pickmon.exe
where there is also the M4 patch floppy-image, so you don't have to go
through the rigmarole of expanding that, which was what was causing
all my floppy problems, not modern drives or worn discs. I now have a
fully functioning AP/DOS system, thanks to using the original TELEGET
program. I had mistaken the floppy-tape images as raw copies because
their first 16 bytes are clear ASCII, but they have to extracted from
"advanced compression method" when, hey presto, they all become 1440
bytes.
All you have to do, Malcolm, is put your old pick folder at exactly C:
\PICK and replace its PICKMON.EXE with the downloaded one.

Nope. Still comes up with

Reboot system using CONFIG.SYS with FILES=15 or more

I have abandoned the plan to recover the data. Thanks to all which
responded on and off list

Malcolm Bull

On Aug 24, 3:58*am, Malcolm Bull <calderd... (AT) sky (DOT) com> wrote:

Just boot a DOS setup under VirtualBox for Win. Took me 5 minutes to
get a virtual DOS machine going with a 512MB virtual hdd. I have a
6.22C boot/system floppy image that works. You can probably find one
from one of the boot image sites Just attach the floppy image to the
vbox machine as a floppy and it will boot it. You can then set up a
traditional bootable C: using a virtualbox disk file and transfer the
DOS system files over.

Glen

On Aug 29, 5:04*am, GlenB <batch... (AT) bellsouth (DOT) net> wrote:
Sorry, I thought I had said that I already have the DOS files, so no
transfer needed; it's just the

Reboot system using CONFIG.SYS with FILES=15 or more

that I needed to overcome, before (as I said) I abandoned the idea.