opening ancient RockSim RKT files

I'm currently using the Mac RockSim (9.1). I have a bunch of ancient RKT files created by old Windows versions that can't be opened in the newer/Mac version. It could be just the Mac version that doesn't have backward compatibility, or it could be that the format changed incompatibly in the past. Does anyone have any insight?

(I just sent a similar query to Apogee directly, but thought people here might have experience as well.)

I wonder if OR's .rkt importer would be able to read them in and then you could just re-save to bring them up to current?

Worth a shot...

Yes OpenRocket should be able to save back to RKT.
Perahps you should attached a file that has problems

If the files are in binary format, then you will need to run an old version of Rocksim to read them. Only versions 6 and 7 can read the binary files then save the newer XML text files.

-- Roger

jadebox said:

If the files are in binary format, then you will need to run an old version of Rocksim to read them. Only versions 6 and 7 can read the binary files then save the newer XML text files.

Click to expand...

Yep, that's almost certainly the problem. These files are from 1998 through 2005 and are not XML format.

So I need to set up a Windows VM and find a version of RockSim v7 I guess. What version of Windows would that have been, Windows XP?

I have version 7.0.3.1 running on XP.

I have v 7.0.xxx running on win 7.
Now, if I could get wrasp to run on win 8.1 tablet all would be good.

JD

Thanks to all who responded for offering help!

A friend send me a copy of RockSim 6, which I was able to use on a Windows XP image running in a VM. So, I was able to convert the binary files to XML format. (Thanks Tony!)

Apogee was unable to help, and told me that the binary file format was phased out a decade ago. So, if you have old files from version 5 or earlier laying around, I suggest converting them before they become unrecoverable.

Hello,

this is definitely not a new issue. You should be able to save the old versions from the binary format to the xml version with Rocksim through v7. They changed to the XML version with v8. To elaborate a bit, a quote from Tim van Milligan from an email to explain:

"There was a reason we dropped the old file format. The binary format that we used previously was actually a Microsoft proprietary format. As long as we kept only a Windows version of RockSim, everything was fine. But we wanted the files to open on Mac, and eventually on Linux. Microsoft wanted us to pay them a yearly royalty if we did that. So we decided that we'd switch to an XML format (text based) so that we would have the capability to expand RockSim to other operating systems. We did this a long time ago, and made version 6.0 the first edition to use the new format. In preparation for the switchover, version 6 and 7 did convert the files to the XML format when they were saved. In version 8, the first version that worked on Mac, we had to drop the binary format and anything associated with it.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that this is NOT a new problem. It came up 4 years ago when version 8 was released in 2005."

I hope that sheds some light on this.