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geoWrite Source Code

by Berkeley Softworks, reverse engineered by Michael Steil.

Description

geoWrite is a WYSIWYG rich text editor for the Commodore 64 GEOS operating system.

Like GEOS, it has extremely low hardware requirements:

  • a MOS 6502-compatible CPU (usually at 1 MHz or higher)
  • 64 KB of RAM
  • one disk drive (typically 170 KB)
  • a 320x200 monochrome screen
  • a pointing device

With just 35 KB of binary code, geoWrite has the following features:

  • graphical, menu-based user interface
  • WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get")
  • up to 8 proportional pixel fonts per document
  • bold, italics, underline, outline, subscript, superscript
  • left aligned, right aligned, centered, justified
  • variable line spacing (1, 1.5 and 2)
  • variable left and right margins; paragraph margins
  • regular and decimal tabs
  • headers and footers
  • inline images
  • documents up to 62 pages
  • English and German version

Source

This is the reverse engineered source code of the English and German versions of geoWrite 2.1 for the Commodore 64.

The source has been heavily reorganized, nevertheless, a standard compile will generate binaries that are identical with the English/German geoWrite 2.1 distribution binaries.

Requirements

  • make
  • cc65 for assembling and linking
  • Python for encrypting some protected/obfuscated code

Building

Entering

make

will build the English version. To build the German version, enter

LOCALE=de make

The build output will be in build/en and build/de, respectively.

The resulting files are the individual VLIR records, the file header, and the copy protection sector:

geoWrite-0.bin
geoWrite-1.bin
geoWrite-2.bin
geoWrite-3.bin
geoWrite-4.bin
geoWrite-5.bin
geoWrite-6.bin
geoWrite-7.bin
geoWrite-8.bin
geoWrite-fhdr.bin
protection.bin

The build process can re-create a flat "CVT" VLIR file with metadata (track & sector data, time stamp) fixed to values from geoWrite_en_2.1_1988-07-06.cvt file.

To prepare cvt file enter

make && make cvt

Binary Collection

The orig subdirectory contains a collection of different versions of geoWrite:

Names Description
geoWrite_en_1.0-1986-03-07 English 1.0
geoWrite_en_1.1-1986-04-07 English 1.1
geoWrite_en_1.1-1986-04-07_alt English 1.1 (alternate version)
geoWrite_es_1.1_1986-04-07 Spanish 1.1
geoWrite_en_1.3-1986-10-05 English 1.3 (original version)
geoWrite_en_1.3-1987-07-17 English 1.3 (updated version)
geoWrite_de_1.3-1987-10-16 German 1.3
geoWrite_en_2.0-1986-10-05 English 2.0 (geoWrite Workshop box)
geoWrite_en_2.1_1987-09-27 English 2.1 (geoWrite Workshop box)
geoWrite_de_2.1_1987-12-11 German 2.1 (geoWrite Workshop box)
geoWrite_en_2.1_1988-07-06 English 2.1 (bundled with GEOS 2.0)
geoWrite_de_2.1_1989-01-03 German 2.1 (bundled with GEOS 2.0)
geoWrite_de_2.1_1996-02-08_ww German 2.1, unofficial Werner Weicht patches
geoWrite_de_2.2_1993-08-08_fr German 2.1, unofficial Falk Rehwagen patches
geoWrite_de_2.2_1996-02-10_fr_ww German 2.1, unofficial Falk Rehwagen/Werner Weicht patches
geoWrite_de_2.2_1996-11-04_fr_ww German 2.1, unofficial Falk Rehwagen/Werner Weicht patches (Update)
geoWrite_de_2.1_1989-01-03_plus4 German 2.1, unofficial Plus/4 patches
geoWrite_de_2.1_1989-01-03_plus4_alt German 2.1, unofficial Plus/4 patches (alternate version)
geoWrite_de_2.1_1989-01-03_plus4_alt2 German 2.1, unofficial Plus/4 patches (alternate version 2)
  • The date codes are taken from the application's last modified dates.
  • It is unknown whether this contains all official versions. Was there a 1.2 version? Were there German 1.0/1.1/1.2 versions? Were there any more localized versions?
  • The FR/WW patched versions have been created by applying the respective "Patch System" patches to the German 2.1 version.
  • The source in this repo produces the GEOS-bundled versions of geoWrite 2.1, i.e. the last official versions.

Status

The code has not been completely commented yet:

Component Status
Record 0: MAIN: library code, core text editing 90%
Record 1: init, copy protection 100%
Record 2: core text editing 30%
Record 3: cut, copy, paste 100%
Record 4: ruler editing 20%
Record 5: startup/about, create, open, version conversion, paste text, run desk accessory 80%
Record 6: navigation, search/replace, header/footer, repaginate 70%
Record 7: printing 20%
Record 8: print settings 10%
Copy Protection 100%

TODO

  • Comment the remainder of the code.
  • Incorporate the Werner Weicht, Falk Rehwagen and Plus/4 patches as .ifdefs.

Contributing

Pull requests are greatly appreciated. Please keep in mind that a default build must always recreate the original binaries (geoWrite_en_2.1_1988-07-06 and geoWrite_de_2.1_1989-01-03).

Documentation

There is a series of articles on the internals of geoWrite at www.pagetable.com:

License

For the underlying work on GEOS, please respect its license.

The intellectual property added by the reverse-engineering and the subsequent improvements is in the public domain, but the authors request to be credited.

Authors

geoWrite was initially developed by Berkeley Softworks in 1985-1988.

In 2020, Michael Steil re-assembled the sources into cc65/ca65 format and did the reverse-engineering.