A general strategy for retaining XyWrite in a non-DOS world

["Harry Binswanger" hb@xxxxxxxx]

Carlo's mention of Boot Camp made me start thinking about booting into a
machine running XP or W2k. Maybe the future for us is to have a dedicated XP
(or Win2K) machine, and connect that machine to the modern one via network
or Dropbox.

Advantages: None of the slowdowns or configuration jiggering and
re-jiggering required for virtual machines. Low cost--zero, if you already
have such a machine in your closet.

Disadvantages: Networking is even flakier, flukier, funkier than virtual
machine settings; but then Dropbox is amazingly robust, transparent, fast.
And you can copy/paste by having clipboard.txt be in a folder that's inside
Dropbox (so that clipboard.txt resides on both machines all the time). I
already do the equivalent to copy and paste between my PC and my (old) Mac,
using Notepad on the PC and TextEdit on the Mac.

Eventually, parts will wear out--how long can we expect an old machine to
run? Aha, when you get your next computer, the Xy machine can be migrated to
the to-be-retired machine.

So the scheme is:

      Main            Legacy
Year  Machine   OS |  Machine  OS
------------------------------------------------------
2012:   A    XP    |    
2013:   B   Win 7   |   A       XP          
2015    C   Win 8   |   B       XP

To migrate the legacy software to the new machine, I would use my standalone
disk duplicator. That bypasses any issues of licensing. However, some
hardware-specific issues would arise, no? E.g., presumably the old drivers
wouldn't work in the new machine.

Comments?

BTW, here's the AutoHotkey macro for the PC side of copy and paste
(equivalents on the Mac under the much more onerous Quickeys). ! = alt ^ =
ctrl

!c::            ; Alt-c: copy a block & paste into HBCLIP.TXT,
which is also on the Mac via Dropbox
   Send ^c      ; copy the block
  run notepad c:\dropbox\_xfr\hbclip.txt   ; open HBCLIP.TXT with Notepad
  sleep 300    ; allow time for Notepad to open
  Send ^a^v    ; select all existing content, then paste in the new,
overwriting the existing content
  Sleep 300    ; allow time for paste
  Send ^s      ; save file
  Sleep 1500   ; allow 1.5 seconds for save and to see that the paste
went okay
  WinClose  Notepad
  Return

!v::          ; the inverse of !c. Copies what the Mac has put into
HBCLIP.TXT
  Run Notepad c:\dropbox\_xfr\hbclip.txt
  Sleep 300
  Send ^a^c
  Sleep 800
  WinClose Notepad
  Sleep 150    ; wait for Notepad to close
  Send ^v     ; paste into whatever app was active before launching
Notepad
  Return


-----Original Message-----
From: xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx [mailto:xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of C.Caballero
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2014 11:48 AM
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: XY4 on Mac Mini in Boxer


I think you're right, Harry. I was confusing Parallels with Boot Camp.

Carlo Caballero

On Sat, 17 May 2014, Harry Binswanger wrote:

> Parallels is the same, isnt it? Its not a partition, its a file. One
> file (with subfiles) and a program to run it.
>
> From: xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx
> [mailto:xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Fred Weiner
> Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2014 9:19 AM
> To: XyWrite List
> Subject: Fwd: XY4 on Mac Mini in Boxer (fwd)
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: C.Caballero 
> Date: Fri, May 16, 2014 at 11:17 PM
> Subject: Re: XY4 on Mac Mini in Boxer (fwd)
> To: fw1948@xxxxxxxx
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 09:27:15 -0600 (MDT)
> From: C.Caballero 
> To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: XY4 on Mac Mini in Boxer
>
> But I think this is comparing apples and oranges. Parallels (Harry)
> requires an entire partition devoted to Windows 7 (or whatever
> version), whereas Fred, using Boxer, is (if I understand correctly)
> running DOS on a virtual machine inside OS X.
>
> Carlo Caballero
>
>
> On Thu, 15 May 2014, Harry Binswanger wrote:
>
> On the Mac hard drive my XY system is accessible in Finder so it can
> be manipulated from there. Some of the things that U2 has automated
> for Windows systems I have to do by hand, but it's a small price to
> pay for being able to use XY on my Mac.
>
> Under Parallels, it's even better, and there's no real "price to pay."
>
>
>