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by malandrew 4465 days ago
What does she use VMware for?
1 comments

she has been an avid user of

PC Gourmet (Big Blue Disk 39)

since the eighties. I have never been able to extract the recipes easily and she has been using it pretty much constantly for 20+ years so there are too many to do by hand. It worked ok in xp but won't run since windows 7/8 so ... vmware

For the sake of everyone in your family, please back up everything in multiple places. That's awesome to have a snapshot of the culinary history of your family in digital format. When the time is right, share all the recipes!
Sorry for the multiple posts on this. You sent me on a bit of an adventure:

* Downloaded a modified DOSBox build with printer support from http://ykhwong.x-y.net/ (linked from DOSBox wiki so not too worried)

* Mapped LPT1 in DOSBox to LPT1 in Windows

* installed CUPS-PDF [1] on a CUPS server in a VM

* shared virtual PDF printer via Samba to Windows

* ran net use lpt1: \\vm.local\pdf /persistent:yes

* printed from DOSBox and got [2]

1: http://www.cups-pdf.de/ (or apt-get install cups-pdf)

2: https://mega.co.nz/#!ehpxha4b!U2q9lhH2RoniPKucW862Y2qRxCgMJ6...

I will have to try this out.... the problem with extracting all the recipes... of which there are a ton. is that you are still in a go in print them one by one then parse the pdf. What I really wanted to do was figure out how to read the data files then pull everything into a db or something where I could do more with it.
The file format looks whacky but not impossible to parse.

Get in contact with me if you're interested in pursuing this further.

Is there any way you can get a copy of the disk to me? I'm interested in old file formats.
Connections like these are why HN is amazeballs. You can make a simple comment and someone here will have a technical interest in helping you out.
Runs pretty well on DOSBox - found Big Blue Disk 93 on cd.textfiles.com.
I could get it to run in DOSBox but couldn't get things to print right the way she wanted it to.

edit: i now see that you found a version of DOSBox that I didn't find that has good printer support.