Archive Obsession show files?

Hi,

For the fingerfull of you that might need to pull OBS show files here is a way.  It's a little discombobulated but you get the idea.

There is a USB driver that works on the obs Intel TC430HX motherboard at https://stefan.co/darkehorse/PC/DOS/Drivers/USB/  It's the motto hairu driver.  Follow the instructions to add it to a boot floppy.

Change the default bios settings on your OBS CPU by holding Delete during boot, navigate to the peripherals and enable USB on the motherboard since the default is disabled.

Copy the OBS off-line editor to a ION/EOS factory boot flash drive, or create your own boot flash drive.  I used Rufus_v1.2.0 http://rufus.akeo.ie/   The path for the show files on the off-line editor flash drive ends up D(?):\etc\obsn43\shows\  You'll need this later.

You can get back to DOS from the factory EOS-ION flash by aborting the EOS-ION install. Cntrl-C.  You can then run OBS off-line by navigating to the flash drive etc\obsn43\ folder and then obs, Obsession off-line comes up.

Basically it is easier to build a boot USB drive with OBS off-line and re-configure your BIOS to boot from it than it is to try to reboot into MS-DOS from XP, or Win7.

Boot OBS with the floppy with the new USB driver and with the flash drive with the OBS off-line editor attached.  You should see the flash drive show up during boot.

A 8gb flash drive fails, but a 4 gb FAT32 ETC factory Kingston 4gb ION-EOS restore worked.  If you are building your own use a <2gb flashdrive.

I went-

a: cd C:

C: cd etc\obs\shows

dir /w

This gave me the unintelligible list of OBS shows existing on the OBS CPU.

Then" copy *.* D:\etc\obsn43\shows"

D being the flash drive

All the OBS hard disk show files are then copied to the USB drive in the correct location.

At this point you have a bootable USB flash drive that can run obsession off-line, and has all your old shows available in the off-line editor.

What you do with it from there I'm not addressing.

OK, Something is wrong, the show files are listed in the directory, but the cues are empty.

Not that anybody needs to know this these days, but here are a couple tidbits.

Obviously off-line 4.3 could not read the OBS version 5.1.0 cues. 

When upgrading an Obsession II from 5.1.0 to 5.1.1 I needed to format the floppys on the OBS brain itself, no amount of manipulating disks off of it would allow the upgrade to complete all 5 disks.  I copied the 5 disks to the floppy from a flashdrive from with OBS DOS.  Kinda nostalgic remembering all those dos commands.  I only upgraded because I thought that was why the off-line 5.2.3 was not reading the show files.

I managed to get Off-Line 5.0 to run from a bootable flashdrive, and could see and work with the shows and cues copied from the 5.1.0 brain.  Of course this is not that helpful since one of the points of this endeavor is to get ascii exports.

I used rufus 1.3 and formatted the flashdrive as FAT with MS-DOS system files.

After successfully upgrading the brain to 5.1.1, and using the obstrans to convert all shows on hard disk, I still could not see the shows copied into the hard drive directory ( C:\etc\obsn\shows ) of off-line 5.2.3 in Windows.  After saving a new show and seeing the extension was .dat, I renamed the shows copied from the brain to have a .dat extension.  It worked, all the shows taken from the brain are now available and exportable as ascii from Off-line 5.2.3.

I'm not sure why the OBS itself isn't using the same extension.