Re: Help! How to use Binscii??

[nparker@cie.uoregon.edu (Neil Parker)]

In article <1993Jul9.135742.20819@news.cs.indiana.edu> tj@cs.indiana.edu
(Lloyd T Jones) writes:
>	O.K., I'm an idiot.  And a real frustrated one.  While we've owned
>our GS for a few years now, I've just recently aquired a hard drive.  So now
>I have gotten serious about getting some of the software out on the wire.
>But, I've been going nuts trying to figure out how the hell you 
>unpack/uncompress Binscii so I can make Skrinkit useful.  All the info I have
>says to EXE the file.  Fine.  Now will someone please hold my hand and very...
>..carefully....step-by-step, tell me how to do this. Does it have to be done in
>BASIC?  Is there some other program I need?  Do I need to make sacrifices
>at full moon?!!?  Any responses would be welcome, not only from me but my kids
>who want to play some of the cool sounding games I've downloaded, but can't
>figure out how to uncompress.  E-mail is fine, unless you think there are other
>closet idiots out there who have just started but are afraid to ask.  Thanks,

The first thing you need to do is get the file BINSCII.EXE onto your GS.
Since the proper method for doing this depends heavily on what terminal
program you're using and what kind of system you're downloading from, I'll
assume that you've already done this step, and there is a text file called
BINSCII.EXE on one of your disks.

Next, you need to boot ProDOS and go into BASIC.  If you boot your GS into
GS/OS, then just double-click on the BASIC.SYSTEM icon.  Otherwise, you'll
need to boot a disk that contains the files PRODOS and BASIC.SYSTEM.  (If
you don't have such a disk, you can make one easily using just about any
copy program...format a blank disk, and copy the PRODOS and BASIC.SYSTEM
files onto it.  If you use a GS/OS disk as the source for these files,
don't copy the PRODOS file from the GS/OS disk...instead, copy the file P8
from the SYSTEM folder onto your blank disk, and rename it to PRODOS.)

Once you've booted ProDOS and gotten into BASIC, insert your disk with the
BINSCII.EXE file into a disk drive.  If you put it in a drive other than
the one you started BASIC from, then type "CAT,Ss,Dd", where "s" is the
slot number of the other drive, and "d" is the drive number...for example,
if you have 5.25-inch drives, they are probably S6,D1 and S6,D2, and your
3.5-inch drive is probably S5,D1.  (The CAT command makes sure the "current
disk" is the one with BINSCII.EXE on it.)

Now type "EXEC BINSCII.EXE".  The disk drive should spin for a while, and
the screen should fill up with ] and * prompts, and when it's done, you
should find a file called BINSCII, whose type is SYS, on your disk.  If
BINSCII exists, but its type isn't SYS, then type "DELETE BINSCII" and
start over from the beginning of this paragraph.  If the EXEC BINSCII.EXE
command produces lots of error messages instead of a BINSCII file, then you
probably downloaded the file incorrectly (it needs to be downloaded as a
TEXT file, and all the end-of-line markers need to be translated to
carriage returns).

If all went well in the last paragraph, then you should have working
BINSCII program.  Type "-BINSCII" to run it.


Good luck.  If these instructions were too opaque, try FTPing to
cco.caltech.edu, cd to /pub/apple2, and get the files "binscii.exe" and
"binscii.txt".  The latter contains a lengthy explanation of how to unpack
and use BINSCII.

               - Neil Parker
--
Neil Parker                 No cute ASCII art...no cute quote...no cute
nparker@cie.uoregon.edu     disclaimer...no deposit, no return...
parker@corona.uoregon.edu   (This space intentionally left blank:           )