I am new to XYWrite (1 year in ) but I have a dedicated a 1997 IBM Aptiva E34-2137 running MS-DOS 5.0 to the cause.
For the historical record I will detail my quest.
Disgusted with modern printer's ink problems I bought a 1985 Cosmo World Adeus CP 2000 daisy wheel printer.
Then I tried out all the classic word processor programs and settled on XYWrite.
The Aptiva was barely used but had a number of built in flaws. 1) fan too noisy, 2) Hard drive too noisy, and
3) Lack of a 5.25 floppy disk drive (I got 5.25 floppy disk images of XYWrite off the internet).
1) I had from somewhere a 4" blower fan so I made a duct to carry cold air to it's cpu heat exchanger out of cardboard and duck tape. Care was taken to avoid recirculating hot air. I run the blower on 3.5 volts only and it is near-silent.
2) I used a $2, 2gigabyte solid state drive with a $2 SATA-to-PATA adapter. It is silent and oh-so-fast.
3) Paid $12 (eBay) for a Epson SD600 5.25 floppy drive new-in-box with it's edge-connector cable.
It took quite a bit of doing to get the downloaded images actually on to 5.25 floppies. What worked was to get them off the Net with a Windows 7 64-bit machine and on to a 1-gig flash drive.
Then I keep many different Clonezilla system images of different operating systems on mem sticks ready to use on the Aptiva. First I selected Windows 98 second edition and used an old version of WinImage to do the floppy-writing.
[I went ahead and made perfect 5.25" MS DOS 5.0 install floppies as well]
Then I wiped the little SSD, did a fresh install of DOS 5 and XYWrite, tested the printer driver - and then made a Clonezilla system image of that.
Every time I begin a new document I put the fresh image back on the drive. When it is completed I make an image of the drive with however many pages of that specific document inside it.
Yes it has the disadvantage of needing it's own little desk and chair in front of a north window with it's own computer system on it. I like a 17" LCD standard-aspect monitor. I like the clicky IBM keyboard that came with the Aptiva. I use an old Microsoft PS/2 (round-plug) TrackBall when I need a mouse.
I got the idea to do this from how George R.R. Martin wrote Game of Thrones. I just used my knowledge of
computer hardware to be certain DOS 5 and XYWrite would "see" exactly what they "wanted" to see in terms of system calls and computer architecture. The Aptiva is a Pentium I machine - it is the last thing 1985 XYWrite absolutely has to run correctly on.
Getting my email filled up by you guys fiddling with poor unhappy XYWrite shotgun-married to W7 64-bit and modern printers was my impetus for writing this.
PS - The next-most-perfect method of using XYWrite to run a Daisy Wheel printer is to use a 2002-03 Dell B110 running Windows 98 second edition with Connectix Virtual PC version 4.0 installed, and DOS 5 and XYWrite running inside of that.. The virtue of that is that instead of making a system image of an entire drive like I do now - one can just have different virtual machines inside of 98 that one can run at will instantly. It's 5 minutes quicker but slightly more fragile and slow to power up than plain DOS 5 running natively.
If anyone is interested I would box up and send my system to you for $1000 shipping and printer included - and then make myself a new one.
On Thursday, July 14, 2016 2:03 PM, Carl Distefano wrote:
Harry,
> Devote an older machine (mine is Win 7 32-bit) to running XyWrite
> (and any other legacy software), then use TeamViewer to operate it
> remotely on your up-tod-ate 64 bit machine,
Interesting idea for making XyWrite available on a non-Windows
computer without having to set up a virtual machine. For 64-bit
Windows machines, however, I think most users would be better off
running a VDM (vDos-lfn being the gold standard for XyWrite), or
setting up 32-bit Windows in a virtual machine.
TeamViewer is nifty (and thanks for telling me about it a couple of
years ago). Last week I used it to remotely install vDos-lfn on one
XyWriter's computer, and it worked like a charm. After the remote
session was over, however, I forgot to close TeamViewer on my machine,
until it dawned on me that the computer was running slower than usual.
If you don't notice a difference, that's great, but there is certainly
some cost involved in running TV. (The same applies to a virtual
machine, of course.)
--
Carl Distefano
mailto:cld@xxxxxxxx