atem -- metastock reverse
=========================

atem converts metastock binary data to ASCII text. It was written due to the
lack of a fast and reliable tool.
The most useful tool so far was ms2asc by Mohammed Illyas Mansoor but there are
several bugs and issues which can't be fixed because Mohammed seems to be
unreachable and unfortunately he'd never released the source code.



Reasons to use atem
-------------------

 - It's fast, factor 15-20 compared with ms2asc.
 - Full support of EMaster files. Most other tools are just ignoring them which
   may results in wrong dates and loss of symbol descriptions.
 - Correct handling case sensitivity of file names.
 - Simple but powerful command line interface.
 - BSD open source license.



Installation
------------

 Building from source requires a c++ compiler (tested with icc/icpc and gcc/g++)
 and libpopt. Windows has been successfully tested using cygwin and mingw.

 ./configure
 make
 make install

 (Within git repo type "autoreconf -fi" before.)



Usage
-----

 By default atem reads metastock data from current directory and writes complete
 time series to stdout, see atem --help.



Known issues / TODO (feedback is welcome)
-----------------------------------------

 - So far atem has been extensively tested on x86_64 Linux only. There might be
   problems on other architectures because of the optimized to_string functions.
   In this case try './configure --disable-fast-printing'.
 - Sample data and unit tests to be added.



Contact Information
-------------------

  If you have questions, bug reports, patches etc., contact
  Ruediger Meier <[email protected]> (in English or German).