Ebcdic2vdt

The ebcdic2vdt / unitel2vdt tools have been written to extract Videotex pages from 8" Unitel disc images.

Requirements

These tools need a Linux environment with Bash and GCC. unitel2vdt only requires bash and no compilation.

Compilation

Running make will generate the searchpage command in the current directory.

It is used by the splitpages.bash script.

Usage

Directly converting Unitel disc image into videotex files

./unitel2vdt.bash mydiskimage.img

Each videotex page is saved into a separate file like:

mydiskimage.img-003229.vdt mydiskimage.img-005377.vdt etc...

This script takes care of:

• converting EBCDIC
• extract videotex pages from their possible fixed location on the disk
• keep only non empty pages

Converting a raw Unitel disc image to ASCII

Unitel discs come from systems using EBCDIC. Since the Videotex pages use the ASCII encoding, the images must be converted.

This is the role of the ebcdic2vdt.bash script:

cat disc.img | ./ebcdic2vdt.bash > disc.img.vdts

Extracting the Videotex pages

Once the Unitel disc image has been converted, Videotex pages can be extracted:

./splitpages.bash disc.img.vdts

The generated files will look like this:

disc.img-46336-47376.vdt
disc.img-48384-49400.vdt
disc.img-50432-51841.vdt
disc.img-52480-54110.vdt

Notes

These are quick and dirty tools, don't expect too much!