Hi there guys.

I was hoping that you could help me with an obscure problem that I'm trying to solve.


Background:
Like a lot of people my age, I grew up with, and love the Amiga range of computers.
(Linux is the closest feeling I get to using an Amiga these days).

(For those who may be unaware BITD, before we had the internet) we used disk magazines
to store/distribute and display data and articles on floppy disks.

One of these was called Grapevine and it was one of the best diskmags ever made.

Myself and others are trying to convert these articles back into plain text / PDFs
So that they can be read much easier and without having to run an emulator.

However they were crunched down with Amiga archiving software called Powerpacker,
and then altered slightly to hide this, and obfuscate the archiving mechanism.
(So I can't just use Powerpacker on an Amiga emulator to recreate the files).


Issue:
I'm trying to -
2.1. Scan these files and strip out the individual articles.

2.2. Unpack /(de-crunch) some files.

I believe that once I have been able to extract the articles from the files
I will be able to put them into Powerpacker on the Amiga emulator,
unpack the files, then save each article individually.


Troubleshooting:
I have tried the following -

1. OCR using OCR reader = Terrible results.

2. OCR using gscan2pdf = Reasonable results. However you still need to do a lot of manual
clean up on each of the text files.

This would constitute a massive amount of work for the thousands of articles
that are in the complete set of Grapevine disks.

3. Looked at the files in a HEX editor

One of the guys on the EAB Amiga Forum has taken a look using a hex editor
and noticed the following details about the article files

He has also very kindly -

4.1. Created a Windows script/console app to do this (created using C#).
4.2. Provided the source code for this script/app (see attachment).

As a result I then tried -
5. Using the Windows console app but using -
5.1. A 32-Bit Wineprefix
5.2. A 32-bit Play on Linux install

Neither of which worked.


Questions:
Can you help create a bash script that would -

1.1. Scan the grapevine articles files.
1.2. Split out the articles from the file.
1.3. Change the header from TXT! back to PP (to denote that it's a powerpack file)

This should allow me to then use powerpacker to save each text file individually
so that we can obtain the separate text files, once again.

I was hoping that providing the source code would make this a whole lot easier
for the programmers amongst you.


Useful extra details:

Source code - For the Windows CLI/app (above)
Stored as a .txt file

I had tried to also upload the Windows console/app
and an actual Grapevine bin file containing the archived articles
however the upload system would not recognize them as valid files

And I didn't want to rename them in the hopes that it would
pass the filter.



A MASSIVE TIA - for any help or advice.

Attached Files

gv_extractor_source_c_sharp.txt (1.2 KB, 4 views)

Have you seen this page?
The Ancient project on GitHub appears to be active.

1 members found this post helpful.

@allend

Thanks for your link, it was very interesting.
And had some cool Amiga and Linux tools on there.

I did eventually get the Windows app to compile in Linux (using mono)
with a little help from some members on another forum

I was then able to scan the files, and extract the basic individual files from the
Amiga Grapevine bin file.

Now I just need to try and script the unpacking, converting to ASCII
and possibly even removing some ASCII control codes from the basic text.

But thanks again for your help and suggestions.

1 members found this post helpful.

Using ancient worked perfectly (even if the syntax is a bit weird).

So the next step is to knock together a basic bash script to automate this
whole process.

What I'd like to do is -

Scan a dir, (containing multiple of these separate and differently named powerpacked files).
Then either -

1. Use ancient to unpack the compressed Amiga data file (extension = .pp20)

1.1. Unpack it into the same dir, but have the output file named the same as
the original, but add .txt to the end of the output file.

Or

2. Use ancient to unpack the compressed Amiga data file (extension = .pp20)

2.1. Unpack the output file into a different dir, and again add .txt to the end
of each output file.

How would I go about doing this please ?

1 members found this post helpful.

I am not familiar with ancient, so an example of usage would help.

As a start to a bash script, perhaps a simple loop construction would suffice.