Wow. Retro goes way back more than twenty years.
Before doing anything, make sure the systems you are migrating still exist. One member wanted to bulk migrate all their data from eternity which included a few systems that had since been replaced and retired.
Moving the data over is manageable with a decent text editor that supports search / replace and maybe a spreadsheet program to insert XML style attribute names.
First problem is adding attribute names to each of the columns. I really don't remember the retro format so take this with a pinch of salt. Open the GID file in Excel or OpenOffice or LibreOffice. You may need to play with delimiter to get the data to load correctly. Insert extra columns in between the existing columns.
Suppose the columns are ID, Label, Rank, Color, Notes (there's more than this but good enough to get the idea across).
Imagine a line of text like this:
12345,"a group label",50,FF0000,Notes
In a spreadsheet it will look like this (there the pipes denote column boundaries).
| 12345 | a group label | 50 | FF0000 | Notes |
Your goal is to create a line of text that looks like:
<Group id=123456 label="a group label" rank=50 color=0xFF0000>Notes</Group>
If there are no notes, a self-closing element will do.
<Group id=123456 label="a group label" rank=50 color=0xFF0000 />
Insert a new column on the left. Fill the rows with the "<Group id=" prefix.
In the column between id and label, insert another column with "label=\".
Between label and rank, insert a column with "\" rank=".
Between label and rank, insert a column with "\" rank=".
In the last column, add the closer to the Group element eg. " />".
Export that to a text file, tab delimited.
Open it in your editor and delete the tabs.
Fire up the newer version of UT, point the signal role VFO to a control channel and let it discover all the basics on the site / system.
Shut down the program.
Open the XML in your preferred editor.
Locate the first <Group ... /> element.
Paste all your Group rows there.
Save the file.
Internet Explorer had a feature where it could tell you if an XML file was "well formed". I think Edge sort-of offers the same ability. Examine the XML file in Edge. It might complain that an attribute is missing an equal sign or, if quoted, is missing a quote.
You would need to repeat this for the users file. I suggest doing a few groups / users at first to verify the process. Don't do more than one system at a time.
