A while ago, colleagues from our imaging studio approached me about an old Inmagic DB/TextWorks database. The database was originally created around the year 2000, and contained information about photographed items from our collection. From an old machine of a retired former colleague, they had recovered both the database, and installer files of two versions of the DB/TextWorks software. However, they were unable to either read the database with modern software, or to get the original software running on modern hardware.
The obvious solution would be to run the software in an emulated environment, and use the emulation to export the database to a more readable format. Oracle VirtualBox used to be my go-to software for such emulation jobs. As I’m trying to move away from (US-based) big tech software, this time I decided to give QEMU a try instead. Although I’ve used QEMU before, it’s been quite a while, and I noticed that a lot of online QEMU resources are quite outdated, which can make things confusing if you don’t know where to look.
The main goal of this post is to document the main steps that make up a “migration through emulation” use case like this:
The installation of QEMU.
The creation of a virtual machine (VM) in QEMU, and the installation of an operating system (in this case Windows XP).
The use of a “virtual thumb drive” to exchange data between the VM and the host machine.
Even though this specifically covers the Inmagic DB/TextWorks case, most of this will be applicable to other “migration though emulation” use cases as well.
In the final section I also give an overview of the general file structure of a DB/TextWorks 7.0 database, and I provide two openly-licensed example databases.
My recent work on the Microsoft Multiplan and Quattro Pro for DOS formats made me think how far LibreOffice has come over the past years in its support of legacy file formats. These formats are supported through software libraries that are developed within the Document Liberation Project (DLP). This project was set up in 2014 by The Document Foundation, which is also the home of LibreOffice. Aside from their use in LibreOffice, these libraries are also the foundation of a set of stand-alone command-line tools that allow you to convert a wide range of legacy file formats to the OpenDocument formats and EPUB.
Much of the available information about these libraries and tools is scattered across different platforms. The command-line tools are also surprisingly hard to find, even though they have been around for a long time. This short post is an attempt at bringing the most important information I could find about them together.
in 2014 I wrote a post on the Quattro Pro for DOS spreadsheet formats. This documents my attempts at reading a few old Quattro Pro for DOS spreadsheets from my personal archives with modern (at the time) software. Back then, neither Microsoft Excel nor LibreOffice Calc supported these formats. Only the then-current Quattro Pro X7 was able to read the files, but there were several issues related to formatting, rendering of charts, and the handling of external references. Based on these tests, I argued that Quattro Pro for DOS could be a case of that rarest species in the world of digital preservation: a file format that had truly become obsolete!
Last week I was contacted by Tristan Zondag from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision for advice on files he had recovered from some old floppy disks as part of an ongoing digital archaeology project. Based on the files’ byte structure, Tristan suspected that these were Multiplan files. Multiplan is a spreadsheet application that was developed by Microsoft between 1982 and 1990.
However, the files weren’t recognised by DROID, and Tristan also wasn’t able to open them in the original Multiplan software, which is why he asked me to have a look at it. In response to this I did some tests where I ran old MS-DOS versions of the Multiplan software in DOSBox-X.
The main purpose of this post is to document how I made this work. This is probably of interest to others who are working with old Multiplan files. It might also serve as a useful introduction to emulating old MS-DOS software in DOSBox-X.
Since the files from Sound and Vision are subject to access restrictions, I’m not able to share them here. So, all examples in this post are based on publicly available Multiplan files. In the final sections I briefly explain how I used the emulation to make the data in those files accessible in modern software, and I also discuss some alternative options.
Ever since its start in late 2013, this blog has been hosted on Github Pages, using the Jekyll static site generator. On a technical level this always worked flawlessly, but in the current geopolitical climate I no longer want my site being hosted at a US-based tech giant. After reviewing some options, I decided to migrate the site to Codeberg Pages, which is operated by a non-profit organization that is based in Germany. I also implemented a new comments system that is based on ActivityPub. This allows readers to post comments with a Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon) account.
