moogal opened this issue on Jul 20, 2013 · 8 posts
moogal posted Sat, 20 July 2013 at 6:54 PM
Before Truespace, Caligari published 3D software for the Amiga OS. The program Caligari Broadcast saved objects in the .sobj format. I have some objects in that format but can't find anything capable of converting them to .obj. There was a bug in Truespace 1.0 that caused these objects to come in with offset axes. I think it was fixed later, but I'm not sure where to get early versions of Truespace at this time, and if they still would work under Win7. I had a program called PixelPro ages ago that could read the .obj format, but I've never been able to get it to run since leaving Win2K years ago. Anyone have a suggestion for this unusual problem?
markschum posted Sat, 20 July 2013 at 9:34 PM
is the file format text or binary ?
willyb53 posted Sun, 21 July 2013 at 8:21 AM
accutrans from micromouse handles some caligari formats, I do not know if it handles the ones you need. 30 day trial.....
http://www.micromouse.ca/
Bill
People that know everything by definition can not learn anything
moogal posted Sun, 21 July 2013 at 3:15 PM
Quote - is the file format text or binary ?
Based on how a file looks in notepad I'm guessing binary... Text, I think, would be easier to parse.
"CALBSOBJVERS002
FixedMultiGun ?Ç“¿åµ7?€ ?€ ?€ @…¬ @…¬´˜ñ ³¬Þ†@…¬½è¹ ?€ >u#' >u#'±ž‚’3À ²‹b…>u#$<ÞÙP ?€ ÿÿÿ ¬¬ÿ HeavyBase"
Khai-J-Bach posted Sun, 21 July 2013 at 4:15 PM
it's .SOB and tS 4 can read it... dunno about 5/6/7... and since MS killed Caligari...
moogal posted Sun, 21 July 2013 at 4:33 PM
Quote - it's .SOB and tS 4 can read it... dunno about 5/6/7... and since MS killed Caligari...
It may be the same as .sob, but all of them were originally saved with the extension .sobj. I do have some older versions of Truespace laying around somewhere, was hoping to find something a little smaller to handle the task, and hadn't used Truespace since moving to Win7 64-bit. I suppose they should still work if I can find the disks.
lmckenzie posted Sun, 21 July 2013 at 11:12 PM
.sobj was what I saw looking around a bit - had never heard of it. I got the free TS7, but yet to install it. Imports probably don't go back that far but you never know. If you have a copy of Win2K or 98 around, using VirtualBox, VirtualPC etc. to set up a virtual machine might be helpful for those old programs.
"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken
moogal posted Mon, 22 July 2013 at 2:36 AM
It's been a while, but I seem to remember that CrossDos truncated the extensions to three letters when you wrote an Amiga file to a PC formatted disk (it also shortened file names to ten letters to conform to MS-Dos conventions). That might be why .sobj files often only survive today with the .sob extension. Makes we think I probably renamed my files manually at some point in time...