Dungeons and Dragons Exploring a New Edition

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

Wrong. You just need the relevant PS driver for the software. Ok, that's not always going to be available, but there are PS drivers for even such old OS's as CPM...

not wrong, a driver doesn't open the stored data file. the processing I'm talking about the the program that opens the data file then processes it so it can send to the drive in the first place.

and WotC isn't palladium... they have to deal with legacy daqta formats of what even TSR used... which isn't nessarly what WotC uses.

an no you can't bet on emualtion professional Dest top publishing of th 80s wasn't programs people out side the fields ever really saw... so the no push to build emulators.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

not wrong, a driver doesn't open the stored data file. the processing I'm talking about the the program that opens the data file then processes it so it can send to the drive in the first place.

and WotC isn't palladium... they have to deal with legacy daqta formats of what even TSR used... which isn't nessarly what WotC uses.

an no you can't bet on emualtion professional Dest top publishing of th 80s wasn't programs people out side the fields ever really saw... so the no push to build emulators.

You really are looking quite ignorant about emulation, Rogue... you don't emulate the program. You emulate the hardware, and run the original program on new hardware.

Almost All the commercially available hardware of the 80's is emulatable. (The rest is close enough that separate emulation isn't needed, like the Tandy hardware running MSDos 3.x)


Really, tho', there weren't that many professional DTP programs; of the ones listed on Wikipedia's DTP comparison page, only two of the 1980's releases haven't had recent (last 3 years) updates: Aldus/Adobe Pagemaker and Grasshopper's PageStream. And PM files from PM 3 onward can be opened in inDesign.

And, given that much of TSR's early work wasn't done DTP (most of the stuff through AD&D 1E was not), scanning is readily an option; supposedly, everything from 2E was, tho'. All of the 2E rules books were available in electronic formats. (AD&D2E Master Tools CD has them all in RTF.) Releasing them as any of a variety of formats is easily done with automatic converters, thanks to the .rtf; I put them on my ebook reader as .lrf files.

It's not like how GDW was converting stuff to Linotype in the mid-80's... by retyping because they couldn't handle the files sent by DGP...

It's simply more likely that the original files don't exist. If they exist, along with original installs, converting them to PDF is straightforward: load the correct emulator for the hardware, run the original software, open the original program, print to post-script, put the resulting .ps file on a mac running OSX 10.5 or later, double click it, and wait for OSX to convert the .ps to a .pdf.

On 'doz, you have to run GhostScript or Acrobat to convert the .ps to .pdf; on linux, you run ps2pdf.

The hardest part is finding and reading the original disks.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

Those would be custom jobs, then...
Floppy sizes were 8", 5.25" and 3.5"

Right, so it was either 8" or 5.25". They didn't have a functional reader for it anyway.

That right there will meet some people's defintion of "too inconveneient to bother with". Probably similar to the way I will someday give up trying to maintain a VHS player.

[Johnny Angel]

I noticed this discussion pop up over on Enworld: http://www.enworld.org/forum/new-hor...gurps-d-d.html

The title of the thread over there is "Should D&D 5E be GURPS D&D."