Cuttle Cart 2 Manual Reformatting Project

[Rob Mitchell]

The purpose of this project is to format the HTML versions of each of the available 2600/7800 manuals so that the ASCII characters will be displayed in 40 columns required by the manual mode of the Cuttle Cart 2.

 

What each volunteer should do is download an HTML manual .. copy the text to a text editor and add carriage returns to each line of text or ASCII graphics representation so that words or graphics are not broken and wrapped from right to left on the screen.

 

Then each reformatted file should be sent to an archivist volunteer who will check the work and save the file as *.TXT according to the name of the game in the Cuttle Cart 2 master game list.

 

I suggest each volunteer choose a letter of 2600 and 7800 games in the database.

 

I choose to reformat the 2600 and 7800 manuals bginning with the letter "A" and 2600 3D Tic Tac Toe to begin.

 

Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA

[Albert]

Below is a link to the 2600 manuals page on AtariAge where the HTML manuals can be grabbed more easily. You can also easily search for individual games from this page. To download the HTML manual, click on the icon.

 

Atari 2600 Manuals

 

Seems like there would be an easy way to do the work of forcing all the manuals to 40 columns, and then manually going in to clean them up after the fact. Many good text editors also allow scripting, which may be a means to speed this process up considerably.

 

..Al

[mvigor]

For the sake of simplicity I will reformat all the manuals that begin with THE LETTER "B" during the next week at work (barring the unforseen).

[+Mitch]

I volunteer to do the "J" section.

 

Mitch

[Albert]

I might as well go look now unless the Als want to host them here somehow.

 

Would be glad to host them here. We can create a page with links to the individual manuals, or just bundle them all up in a zip file and attach them to the first message in this thread. Or both.

 

..Al

[mvigor]

Well then for now as you finish your volunteered assignments, join the manuals you converted together into a ZIP or SIT file and email it to me at

atariage AT vigorfamily dot com

 

I'll check things over and send them in bigger bundles to the kind folks here at AA.

 

-Matthew

[Justin42]

I can do "C"-- is there any text editor that easily can handle a set # of columns? (Like, force it to specifically 40 columns, monospaced?)

 

(I'm trying to think of a way to allow like Windows Scripting [hey, I use it at work all the time, I'm getting good at it ] to parse it out to 40columns but not have it go too crazy and destroy ASCII art.... hrrrm..)

[mvigor]

Personally I'm using BareBones' BBEdit version 6.5 on a Mac. Personally I wouldn't want to script the first run through because lots of things would get messed up and would take longer to "check over and fix" than just doing it ahead of time.

 

Whatever editor you find and choose you'll just have to get a feel for.

 

======

 

MANUAL CONVERSION PROGRESS CHECKLIST

[+Mitch]

One other thing to remember is that the CC2 doesn't support nonstandard characters. There are a few of them in some of the manuals.

 

Also, good luck getting some of the ASCII art to fit in 40 characters.

 

Mitch

[Justin42]

Should we go to 39 columns to be safe? (I remember this as an issue on the Atari 8 bits...)

[+Mitch]

The 7800 can handle 40 columns just fine, no need to go to 39.

 

The "J" file has just been sent. Since it was a short letter to do, I guess I'll pick up a couple of the other short letters as well. Mark me down for "Q", "Y" and "Z"

 

Mitch

[mvigor]

Where can I download the list of file names recognized by the CC2 menu generating software?

[+Mitch]

Go here and download the CC2 menu generator. Unzip the file you downloaded and open the CC2romdb file in a text editor.

 

Mitch

[Mot]

I volunteer to do the "D" section.

[mvigor]

Chad-

 

It's almost certainly too late for this, but I was wondering if it would be worth the time for you to recognize a < BR > command (or similar) as a page break in the instruction manual text files? Then we could be sure our ASCII art won't break across two screens.

[+Mitch]

Chad-

 

It's almost certainly too late for this, but I was wondering if it would be worth the time for you to recognize a command (or similar) as a page break in the instruction manual text files?  Then we could be sure our ASCII art won't break across two screens.

 

I believe it all strictly plain text, so tags won't work. You're probably just going to have to delete the ASCII art if it doesn't fit in 40 columns.

 

Mitch

[cschell]

Chad-

 

It's almost certainly too late for this, but I was wondering if it would be worth the time for you to recognize a < BR > command (or similar) as a page break in the instruction manual text files?  Then we could be sure our ASCII art won't break across two screens.

 

I'm clearly not understanding something here. You can scroll the manual line by line, so you could always scroll the manual to where the art was on one screen.

 

Having a <BR> command wouldn't do anything to expand the 40 characters wide, 16 lines tall display area.

 

If you're actually asking for line breaks (which is what <BR> is in HTML), just put a CR/LF or LF at the end of line before the 40 column mark.

 

Remember that all lines should terminate in CR/LF or LF.

 

Anyway, I don't see the CC2 ever processing markup languages, but I'm still curious to understand what you're asking for and why.

 

Chad

[mvigor]

Chad-

 

Without beta testing for you, I incorrectly assumed that the instruction feature would page the text by one full page at a time, not line-by-line. Sorry to jump to conclusions.

[cschell]

Without beta testing for you, I incorrectly assumed that the instruction feature would page the text by one full page at a time, not line-by-line.  Sorry to jump to conclusions.

 

No problem. In fact you move a page at a time using left or right, or a line at a time using up or down. (I think this is all in the manual.)

 

Chad

[mvigor]

In the cases where the manual is completely unavailable on AtariAge and/or is not available as text, would we prefer to simply OMIT the text file, or should I create placeholder text files with contents like "MANUAL UNAVAILBLE. IF YOU HAVE IT PLEASE TYPE IT IN AND E-MAIL TO ATARIAGE.COM" ??

 

I'm running into this right near the top of my "B" section with Bachelorette Party.

[+Mitch]

In the cases where the manual is completely unavailable on AtariAge and/or is not available as text, would we prefer to simply OMIT the text file, or should I create placeholder text files with contents like "MANUAL UNAVAILBLE.  IF YOU HAVE IT PLEASE TYPE IT IN AND E-MAIL TO ATARIAGE.COM"   ??

 

I'm running into this right near the top of my "B" section with Bachelorette Party.

 

I would just skip it. If the image files are available you can OCR them in to a text document. That's what I did with one of them.

 

Mitch

[Albert]

In the cases where the manual is completely unavailable on AtariAge and/or is not available as text, would we prefer to simply OMIT the text file, or should I create placeholder text files with contents like "MANUAL UNAVAILBLE.  IF YOU HAVE IT PLEASE TYPE IT IN AND E-MAIL TO ATARIAGE.COM"   ??

 

I would also omit the file, but this could be a good means to get a more complete set of text manuals on AtariAge (in addition to helping CC2 owners, of course). If you want to put something to that effect in the manual and website somewhere ("If you see a missing manual and would like to contribute it, blah blah blah"), that would be great.

 

..Al

[Mot]

I typed in a D manual; AA had a scan but no text (it was about one paragraph though).

 

I was wondering if we have a complete list of the character set:

Like A-Z, a-z, 0-9, :;’”,./<>?~!@#$%^&*()-=_+[]{}|

So we can check the manuals for characters that cannot be displayed.

 

This is probably in the CC2 it’s self but does the characters appear the same in Windows ASCII as they do on a CC2, for example, does the value for ‘@’ character the same on the CC2?

 

I have been removing the “Typed in by…” stuff but I could see some people arguing about removing “turn off your Atari, put your <game> in, turn your Atari on …” or

“Atari/Activision limited warranty: Atari reserves the write to sue…”

stuff if we are trying to reduce the size.

Not to mention the Super-charger trouble shooting stuff...

[Justin42]

Is there really a reason to reduce the size? Seems like they're all still going to be pretty small. I'm pretty much converting the entire manual that appears in the white box when you click the HTML link-- so there is some stuff that appears in HTML underneath that isn't going, but it's the entire text of the manual as it came in the game, nothing more or less.

 

I guess we should decide if we're trying to get the gist of things, or completion, as it'd be nice if we're all as consistent as possible. My concern with doing too much editing is everyone will do it differently.

 

As for checking for only valid characters, that's probably a good idea-- at the end I'm sure someone could whip up a script that could parse the files and remove any stray invalids that made it through. I have some code somewhere that does it for web site forms, I'm sure it wouldn't be tooo hard to convert that.

[mvigor]

I definitely left in everything I found here at AtariAge, including the information about the person who went to the trouble of originally typing in the file.

 

I can see both sides of the argument about removing stupid warranty information, and I honestly wouldn't have typed it in the first place if it had been me, but I'm just leaving it in there. Personally I think that if someone cares THAT MUCH about what EXACTLY is in the original manuals they'll OWN the manuals (I have a fairly good sized collection myself).

 

But again, I just took all the text from the table box presented on the page here at AA and used it all. I really didn't remove much at all.

 

 

By the way, I'm going to move on to the letter "E".