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Source code of WordStar for the PC available?

Ruud

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I searched internet for the source code of WordStar but no luck so far. I found this site, wordstar.org, claiming that even WordStar for DOS cannot be downloaded legally. Wikipedia writes that WordStar is no longer developed, maintained or sold by its owners, Riverdeep, Inc. and doesn't mention this site at all.

But if someone can help me with the sources or an URL, I'll be thankful.

FYI: I want to use it as base for an editor for mu own OS. At the moment I'm busy to see if I can use the editor used by Turbo Pascal 3.

Sources of another editor are welcome as well.

Oops, I almost forgot: I'm looking for i8088 ML sources.
 
You might have better luck using the DOS source for Joe; a Wordstar work-alike.
My recollection is that the initial IBM PC version of WS was mostly automatically-converted 8080 assembly code. I'm not sure that you would like to fool with that--I certainly wouldn't.
 
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Thank yo, I will have a look!

Edit: unfortunately it is written in C :(
 
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Edit: unfortunately it is written in C :(
You'll have a very hard time finding anything in assembly. I don't know of the source code to anything in Z80. I guess you're working with a disassembly of Turbo Pascal for the moment?

Also appreciate, Wordstar is huge and very complicated. Even if you did have the sources, it would be a bear to work with.
 
The original DOS versions of WordStar were poorly converted from 8-bit CP/M code and didn't support more than 64K of RAM or subdirectories. Their solution was to rewrite it from scratch as WordStar 2000, with a substantially different interface that alienated existing WordStar users. A group of MicroPro employees left the company and created a WordStar clone called Newstar. MicroPro then bought the rights to Newstar and turned it into WordStar 4.0, which was vastly superior to 3.x while retaining compatibility with it.
 
Newword (WS 4+) should be a lot easier to read but I don't know of a source archive for it.

Maybe you could try ZDE which was a Z80 screen editor which implemented some of the Wordstar command set. There is an earlier VDE with available source code but the one archive I could find I could not extract the files to read. https://github.com/mecparts/zde

Also check with some of the early programming magazines. The two text editors I could find in Doctor Dobbs were both written in C. PC Magazine's Tiny Editor was written in x86 assembler so I presume not what was desired. It was a paragon of readable code though. I know other magazines had text editor source code; I even tried a few back in the early 80s.
 
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The original DOS versions of WordStar were poorly converted from 8-bit CP/M code and didn't support more than 64K of RAM or subdirectories. Their solution was to rewrite it from scratch as WordStar 2000, with a substantially different interface that alienated existing WordStar users. A group of MicroPro employees left the company and created a WordStar clone called Newstar. MicroPro then bought the rights to Newstar and turned it into WordStar 4.0, which was vastly superior to 3.x while retaining compatibility with it.
That was an interesting development, as I recall. We (Sydex) went to WS2000, which was, in many respects, vastly superior to WS 3.3 and utterly incompatible with it. MicroPro thought to handle this by supplying a preconfigured version of Star Exchange, which converted several different wupro formats. The break-away group, calling themselves NewStar, came out with a product called "New Word". In the meantime, MicroPro languished with WS 3.3, ported from the 8080 assembly. Eventually, seeing the resistance to WS2K, MicroPro purchased NewStar and its assets. Contrary to what WikiP claims, WS 4.0 was not exclusively IBM PC-ish; there was a CP/M-80 version of it, which I have. All of this was in answer to the defection of the user community to Word Perfect and the like.
Eventually, the rise of Windows and Word rendered the whole thing moot.
 
Somewhere along the way there was also a scaled-down derivative of WordStar 2000 called WordStar Easy, which must've been a total flop because Jameco was still trying to sell off or give away their remaining stock of it well into the mid-1990s!
 
Somewhere along the way there was also a scaled-down derivative of WordStar 2000 called WordStar Easy, which must've been a total flop because Jameco was still trying to sell off or give away their remaining stock of it well into the mid-1990s!
I'll take a look and see if it was included with the many WS2000 floppies that I have. One could hack one of the files for Star Exchange and get a creditable "universal" document format converter.
 
I'm aware of a toolbox for Turbo Pascal 3.0, created by Borland itself. It includes Turbo Pascal Toolbox Editor, which is some kind of SDK for making your own text editor. It comes with a couple of editors already programmed with their complete source code: First Editor and Microstar.

It can be obtained here: Turbo Pascal Toolbox

(not sure if this is the editor you talked about on the first post)
 
Micropro Easy used the Wordstar 3 file format. If what I read was correct, Easy combined the Wordstar 3.3 engine with a Modula-2 front end for menus but used Wordstar 2000 printer drivers and also had added Topview compatibility. Easy didn't use the keystrokes of either Wordstar 3.3 or Wordstar 2000. Easy also didn't include features to print justified text despite doing that on screen.
 
It includes Turbo Pascal Toolbox Editor, which is some kind of SDK for making your own text editor.
There's a lot of work here, to be sure.

But it's...problematic.

It might run ok on a PC, but on CP/M, it's just not practical.

What this is lacking is any capability to page the file in to memory. Also, neither of the techniques they use for buffer representation (array of lines or a linked list) are actually particularly good for a text editor.

its not clear how difficult it would be to integrate a different buffer mechanic in to this tool kit.

I've typed in the the Software Tools editor (a lightweight UNIX ed line editor clone). That means it's really a pretty simple editor.

And, in the end, using the simple array of lines, it only has space for 150 lines of 100 characters. Which is terrible.

On a PC, with a larger memory model, you may be able to get a lot of value out of this thing. On CP/M, it's a lot, lot harder.
 
VDE/ZDE expect to have about 50K of editing space available on CP/M which should handle at least some tasks.
 
WS 3 wasn't the only x80 product to go the automated conversion route. My friends at Sorcim did the same with Super Writer--they even wrote their own converter.
 
You'll have a very hard time finding anything in assembly. I don't know of the source code to anything in Z80. I guess you're working with a disassembly of Turbo Pascal for the moment?

Also appreciate, Wordstar is huge and very complicated. Even if you did have the sources, it would be a bear to work with.
I found E10-edit at pcorner.com. But if it is a help, I don't know. It only supports lines of 80 bytes and that is not what I have in mind. I'll have a look at it anyway, you never know what interesting bits can be found.

Quite some time ago I found a tool to turn the original COM of TP 3.01 into its source file including comment. It worked and the next step was to turn the generated MASM code in NASM. The COM generated by NASM is not byte exact to the original TURBO.COM due to different codes for the same opcode instructions but it worked. Until I added just one bye. To make a long story short: there were errors in the original source code like hard coded pointers like "move dx,1234h" instead of "move dx,LABEL" and more of those funny things. But in the end I got it right.
So far I used the code to turn it into a tool that turns a given PAS file directly into a COM file.
The complete source code of TP3 that I generated and of this tool is free, just ask me (see my website for the email address).
 
I'm aware of a toolbox for Turbo Pascal 3.0, created by Borland itself. It includes Turbo Pascal Toolbox Editor, which is some kind of SDK for making your own text editor. It comes with a couple of editors already programmed with their complete source code: First Editor and Microstar.

It can be obtained here: Turbo Pascal Toolbox

(not sure if this is the editor you talked about on the first post)
There were more of these toolboxes AFAIK and I have them all, AFAIK, But I'm only interested in editors written in ML. Reason: I'm writing my own OS with even its own file system, just for fun. And having no Pascal or C compiler for it, I want to start with a simple editor in the first place. I'm also working on its own BASIC.
 
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