Greetings from South Yorkshire

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raptornet
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Joined: Tue May 28, 2024 11:09 pm

Greetings from South Yorkshire

Post by raptornet »

Hey guys

Martin kindly activated my account, so thought I'd get my butt on over here and say hello! It's been long minute since I was on the Psion forum, I seem to recall it looking different, has the forum changed? I mean it has been 6 years, but I don't recall it looking this fancy :lol:

I've dug out my LZ because I'm hoping to use it to take inventory of all my vintage computer games, actually scrub that! Lets just call them 'old' games, labelling stuff I bought in my teens as vintage makes me feel unbearably old. The 90s is still about 10 years ago right? ;) If anyone has any recommendations for maybe a database programs, I'm all ears. I think so far my plan is to create a text file and format it as follows:

Title - FORMAT - PLATFORM

Dizzy - Tape - Spectrum
Stuntcar - Disk - Amiga

Preferable if I can find an easy to use application for data entry that would be great, but I need it in a format that once upload to the PC, I can import in to another app. In fact maybe a spreadsheet might be a better approach.

Anyways that's all for now, speak soon!
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Martin
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Re: Greetings from South Yorkshire

Post by Martin »

.
Welcome James or should I say Welcome back!

There is a potted history of the Organiser II on line resources including Boris's 'yellow' forum in the thread (here)

As for building a database you have a few options to consider.

Pocket Spreadsheet (works on a four line LZ)
You could go straight for the (Pocket Spreadsheet) and use it with the ORG-Link_v2 you can export the data in text or formula intact. Some members have had an issue with their Anti-Virus software not letting ORG-Link_v2 down load. I think this is because the author is using some oler windows 95 code to make this small application and the virus checkers don't like it. I use it without any issues. The Author is a member of the forum.

FileMaster IV & FileMaker (works on a four line LZ)
If you don't mind utilising DosBOX you can use FileMaster on the Organiser and FileMaker in DosBOX. Check this out (here). Once you have the database how you like it you can open it in any text editor. I use Windows Notepad with the font set to Currier New so the columns line up. Also check the appendix of the manual to see that Filemaster is completely adaptable and you can incorporate your own OPL stuff to get exactly what you want.

JOTTER (two line version only)
Another option of Jotter. Although it is suppose to be a word processor jotter note pad thingy. It is easily adapted into a card file type database. Check out the Amateur Radio Contact Logger example in the manual (here).

Anyway that's enough reading to be getting on with
Sincerely
Martin
amenjet
Posts: 334
Joined: Tue Jan 03, 2023 7:54 pm

Re: Greetings from South Yorkshire

Post by amenjet »

Martin wrote: Wed May 29, 2024 1:19 pm .
Welcome James or should I say Welcome back!

There is a potted history of the Organiser II on line resources including Boris's 'yellow' forum in the thread (here)

As for building a database you have a few options to consider.

Pocket Spreadsheet (works on a four line LZ)
You could go straight for the (Pocket Spreadsheet) and use it with the ORG-Link_v2 you can export the data in text or formula intact. Some members have had an issue with their Anti-Virus software not letting ORG-Link_v2 down load. I think this is because the author is using some oler windows 95 code to make this small application and the virus checkers don't like it. I use it without any issues. The Author is a member of the forum.

FileMaster IV & FileMaker (works on a four line LZ)
If you don't mind utilising DosBOX you can use FileMaster on the Organiser and FileMaker in DosBOX. Check this out (here). Once you have the database how you like it you can open it in any text editor. I use Windows Notepad with the font set to Currier New so the columns line up. Also check the appendix of the manual to see that Filemaster is completely adaptable and you can incorporate your own OPL stuff to get exactly what you want.

JOTTER (two line version only)
Another option of Jotter. Although it is suppose to be a word processor jotter note pad thingy. It is easily adapted into a card file type database. Check out the Amateur Radio Contact Logger example in the manual (here).

Anyway that's enough reading to be getting on with
Sincerely
Martin
FIND and SAVE on the main menu work well for me. Although I did write some OPL to handle workshop jobs.
raptornet
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue May 28, 2024 11:09 pm

Re: Greetings from South Yorkshire

Post by raptornet »

Thanks guys, I'll give those a try. I'm currently refreshing my memory on using the comm link.
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Martin
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Comm Link

Post by Martin »

The joys of getting a Comm Link working. I'm fortunate enough to have a PC with a hard wired COM1 port so with DOSBox pointing Windows to that it is just like the old days. Andrew has produced a USB Comms Link Top Slot Adaptor. Peter puts them in the Organiser II eBay store when he has a batch.

If you are having difficulties Jaap wrote an excellent paper 'Using the Comms Link' there is a reproduction of it along with the re-published Comms Link Manual at the link (here)

Sincerely
Martin
raptornet
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue May 28, 2024 11:09 pm

Re: Greetings from South Yorkshire

Post by raptornet »

Hey Martin

I printed out the Psi2Win manual, guillotined the pages and stapled it together. Makes for a very handy A3 booklet :D I sat down with it today and was amazed to discovered Psi2Win works on my Ryzen 7 Win10 system, I was honestly expecting I'd have to drag out my old IBM T42, running WinXP. But nope it all worked out fine.

Idk if I should mention this here or some place else on the forum, so don't be surprised if you see a separate post.

Is there anyway to adjust how the Psion 2 transmits text files? When I open up files on the PC, notepad is showing all the docs with hard returns. All the text documents are being uploaded to the PC with line breaks. I recall i had this issue before and ended up using an online word wrapper. Was wondering if there was any other way to deal with it.
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Martin
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Re: Greetings from South Yorkshire

Post by Martin »

YES...

Build 304 has an 'options' selector that helps determine how the files are handled by Psi2Win.

I was working with Boris just prior to his untimely passing on the print mode of version 304 and he hadn't got round to updating the installer. You will see in the installation instructions (in Psi2Win_3034.zip) that his advice was to install build 303 as normal then replace the Psi2Win.exe with build 304

Also for simple file transfers make sure the setup protocol is set to PSION.

Sincerely
Martin
raptornet
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue May 28, 2024 11:09 pm

Re: Greetings from South Yorkshire

Post by raptornet »

Admittedly the documents I'm uploading off the LZ are Autoscribe files and they always look like "Test8". I'm not sure if it's autoscribe that is inserting the hard returns in the document. But if there's a way to get the files of the Psion 2 without them being a narrow column of text, that would be great.
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