PC99W Disk Utilities
Updated 20080920

[Image of about screen]

Introduction

The PC99W Disk Utilities program (pc99wdu.exe) is part of the PC99W(indows) product. The full Windows product is still under development and no release date will be announced until it ready to ship.

PC99W Disk Utilities is a beta release. It has been tested and meets design specifications. You are welcome to download it and use it. However, no support is offered at this stage.

If you wish to report a bug, or suggest an enhancement, please email us. (See the CaDD Electronics Home Page for our email address). Because of time and other constraints, your email concerning this beta product may not be replied to. Please understand this.

The download file is pc99wdu.exe. This is a self-extracting file built with the compression utility lharc.exe from Haruyasu Yoshizaki. It is best executed in a DOS box. After the extraction, run setup.exe to install PC99W Disk Utilities.

WARNING: The installer was created using MS Visual Studio's Package and Deployment Package running in a VB6 SP4 environment under Win 98. The installer may attempt to install files in your Windows system directory. This may cause your system to stop functioning. If you are concerned about this, DO NOT install the package. The program code does not write to the Windows Registry. If you install this package, CaDD Electronics assumes no responsibility for the stability of your system.

Note: We have VS SP5, but after it was installed VB would just lock up. There is no known way to uninstall the service pack, so we had to uninstall VS, lose all our custom settings, re-install VS, and then download SP3 as 12 separate files, and then install it. Thank you, MS.

How to install

Download the file pc99wdu.exe to a temporary directory (e.g. c:\temp). If you are using ftp instead of a browser, remember to set the file type to bin (binary). hash is useful to monitor progress in ftp.
Open a DOS box (Start | Programs | MS-DOS Prompt):

C:\WINDOWS> cd \temp C:\TEMP> pc99wdu.exe

will self-extract the files.
Start the installer:

C:\TEMP> setup.exe

You can also run setup from Windows Explorer.
The recommended install directory is \pc99. If you install anywhere else you will have to edit pc99wdu.ini to match your setup before running the program. (If you don't you will get start-up errors as pc99wdu.exe processes pc99wdu.ini.) If you use long directory names with spaces, they probably have to be quoted. (Remember: you can't go wrong with 8.3 -- ever looked in the \windows directory?)
Check the files: pc99wdu.ini and dsklibs.ini. They should contain appropriate values for your system.
To start PC99W Disk Utilities click Start | Programs | PC99W Disk Utilities | PC99W Disk Utilities. The executable is pc99wdu.exe. The files pc99wdu.ini and dsklibs.ini must be in the same directory as pc99wdu.exe.

How to uninstall

From the Windows desktop, click Start | Settings | Control Panel
Double-click Add/Remove Programs
From the list, select PC99W Disk Utilities
Click Add/Remove and answer Yes.

WARNING: Because of the inherent flaws in the Windows operating system architecture (acknowledged by MS as "dll hell"), you should probably not remove shared files, especially things like comctl2.dll, or other programs may not work any longer.

Features and notes

Note: This release of PC99W Disk Utilities includes a form resize ocx written by VB Gold Software. Any form can be resized to fit your screen.

[Image of initial screen]

From the PC99W Disk Utilties main screen, you can select a .dsk file, double-click, and catalog it in the pc99wdu Disk Manager. From the Disk Manager catalog, you can then manipulate individual files.

If you have a binary search engine -- such as dtSearch -- that returns a .dsk file path and lets you select it, you can simply paste that path into pc99wdu. Then double-click to get the catalog. This is the fastest way to examine and search many .dsk files. It is especially useful when you are looking for DIS/VAR 80 files which may contain information about the disk.

Disk Manager

[Image of disk manager screen]

Render. A central concept in PC99W Disk Utilities is that of "render". After you have cataloged a TI disk, you can select any file on that disk and render it. Render means convert it to useful (human) format. A TI Basic or Extended Basic file will be rendered as displayable text by converting the internal TI token format. You can display TI Basic and Extended Basic files stored in PROGRAM format, or XB files stored as I/V 254 format. Check 28 Columns if you want them in 28-column format to match the line endings on the TI display. Check Blank Lines if you want blank lines to show when a Basic line is exactly 28 characters (mimics the TI Basic editor display). Check Show Tokens to see the Basic line and its underlying token format. Check Show Line Number Table to see the Basic Line Number Table. Each entry is a 16-bit line number followed by a 16-bit memory address. When displaying D/V 80 files with fixed spaces (^) check Display Caret As Space to suppress the carets. Check List Tabs to show the tab settings for a file created in TI-Writer. If render does not understand the file type, you can still dump the file in hex or binary,or run a strings on it (to see the ASCII). If you have a D/V 80 file you can render it to "Epson" which will display the file with a simulated 9-pin printer output. If you want to examine two or more files, check Multiple before clicking Render. All of the options on this screen can be set in pc99wdu.ini (option = 1 = checked). The options can also be selected on this screen and saved to pc99wdu.ini.

Disk Manager -- TI Basic with Cross-Reference

[Image of TI Basic screen with Cross Reference]

You can render a file with TI Basic, TI Extended Basic in both PROGRAM and I/V 254, or in XB MERGE D/V 163 format. The display can be made to match the 28-column TI Basic editor screen, with or without blank lines. Select CREF and you get a list of all variables used in the program in alphabetical order, followed by a count showing the number of times a particular token, e.g. ELSE or GOTO, was used. You can search the listing using regular expressions.

Disk Manager -- TI-Artist

[Image of TI-Artist screen]

When you render a TI-Artist file, you must click on the _P file. Render assumes the previous file is the _C file. If not you will get a black-and-white image.

TI-Artist Instance, TI Font, RLE. A TI-Artist Instance must be in D/V 80 format and the filename must end in "_I". A TI Font must be in D/V 80 format and the filename must end in "_F". An RLE graphic must conform to the CompuServe Vidtext specification.

Disk Manager -- Disassemble

[Image of disassembler screen]

You can select any E/A 5 file and disassemble it. The disassembler screen allows you to create comments for any line, and to flag any line as DATA. Partial disassemblies can be saved and loaded later for further analysis. You can set the base address for the disassembly, and enable checks for out-of-range statements, such as LWPI >FFFF, which would then be flagged as DATA.

Create Library

[Image of create library screen]

The primary reason for developing PC99W Disk Utilities was the Librarian. You can use the Librarian to search up to 2,048 directories each containing up to 16,384 PC99W .dsk files. Use Librarian | Directories to manage your directories. The list of library directories is stored in dsklibs.ini. Use Librarian | Disks to create a library file. This file will contain every TI file on every .dsk file in your library directories. The Librarian output is in .dsk file order. You can put it in alphabetical order by:

C:\TEMP> sort < libfiles.txt > libsort.txt

(The above assumes you have used the Librarian to create libfiles.txt in \temp and that the output file is libsort.txt.) The Librarian has been tested with 10,771 .dsk files containing 173,000 files.

Sector Edit

[Image of Sector Edit screen]

You can edit in either the hex or ASCII pane. A change in one is updated in the other. In the ASCII window, non-ASCII characters are displayed as a gray box. Cursor keys, Home, and End, and the mouse are active in the panes. Use the mouse to move between panes. When you are in the hex pane, and have "moused" past the second character, the next keystroke will update the first character of the following cell. Similarly, in the ASCII pane if you mouse past the lone character in the cell.

If you make a change you need to click Update Sector to save the change. If you don't you will be warned if you click Goto Sector, Previous Sector, or Next Sector. You can choose to ignore this if you wish, and lose any edits. Once you click Update Sector, it is assumed that the "disk" has changed. You can continue to edit multiple sectors before saving the disk. When editing is complete, save the disk by clicking Create Update Disk. Note that Create Update Disk creates a new .dsk file. It does not overwrite the disk you have edited. This is done as a protection (and maybe also to see if the code really works without destroying a whole lot of good disks).

.ini file setup

[Image of ini setup screen]

pc99wdu does not store any information in the Windows registry. Instead it uses a standard .ini file. This file contains many options that can be used to customize the program and save your preferred defaults to.

The .ini setup screen can be used to edit any key in pc99wdu.ini. It can also be used to create a default pc99wdu.ini, and to repair a missing key, or one with out-of-range values.

More features

Compare Disks

You can compare two PC99W disks. The compare will check internal values (e.g. file offset to first 0xfb), standard values (number of sectors, number of sides, number of tracks), and filenames (size, and protection). Compare Disks writes to the save file, and then displays it in the ASCII viewer (usually Notepad).

Send to PC99

You can send a PC file (usually ASCII) directly into PC99, using Windows SendKeys. PC99 believes the keystrokes are coming from the keyboard. A typical application is to have a 9900 assembly source file in an email. Tell your browser to save the file as text. Then start PC99, load E/A, and start the editor. Then execute Utilities | Send to PC99, and the text will be "pumped" into the E/A Editor. When done, you can save the text to a PC99 disk. Send to PC99 was developed to reduce the burden of entering programs from printed material, such as MICROpendium. The program listing is scanned, and output as a text file. Then the text file is sent to PC99 running TI Basic or Extended Basic. (Sure, there are scanner errors, but it is still a whole lot easier than pounding the keyboard for page after page.)

Double-click

Double-click works in most places. For example, from the main form, double-click on a .dsk file. This will show the Disk Manager screen. Double-click on a file. If the type is known, the render selections will be filled in for you, and the file rendered. It's the quickest way of discovering what's on a disk.

The log

pc99wdu records progress information in the log file pc99wdu.log. All trapped errors will indicate the code module that caused the error, and the error message. You can generate extra logging information by setting [trace] trace={0|1|2} in pc99wdu.ini. If you encounter a problem, set trace=2, re-run, and check the log file. If you are stuck, send us a description of how to repeat the problem and the corresponding log file. To save space, a new log file is generated each time the program starts. You should also include the program version. Click About | About PC99W Disk Utilities for the version. The format is yyyy.mm.dd. You can also find the version from Windows Explorer: select pc99wdu.exe, click right, select Properties, tab to Version.

Finally, if you're not a PC99 owner, you are still welcome to download. The utilities should help you at least look at the contents of .dsk files. And with some imagination, you can render files and save them to the PC file system, and then transmit them to a 4A. Of course, we think that using the Read/Write Sector utilities included with PC99 is a whole lot easier -- but that's another story, and this isn't meant to be a sales pitch.