ClausB Posted March 24, 2008 Share Posted March 24, 2008 Has anyone written a PC program to read Atari-formatted floppies in a 5.25" PC floppy drive? Or do I need an Atari-to-PC cable to get Atari disk files to a PC? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted March 24, 2008 Share Posted March 24, 2008 If you are talking about DD disks yes. Stuff such as Ataridsk/Writeatr can do the job with 5.25" PC mechs I believe. Otherwise getting a 10502PC cable or better yet a SIO2PC is the way to go. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MEtalGuy66 Posted March 24, 2008 Share Posted March 24, 2008 If you are talking about DD disks yes. Stuff such as Ataridsk/Writeatr can do the job with 5.25" PC mechs I believe. Otherwise getting a 10502PC cable or better yet a SIO2PC is the way to go. There was alos a dos utility back in the day for the PC that would do single and enhanced density.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Larry Posted March 24, 2008 Share Posted March 24, 2008 Has anyone written a PC program to read Atari-formatted floppies in a 5.25" PC floppy drive? Or do I need an Atari-to-PC cable to get Atari disk files to a PC? Although you can read/write Atari DD disks on a PC, I have found it very cumbersome and unreliable unless the disks are formatted on an XF551. The reason is that an unmodified XF551 uses the timing hole to format a disk. I believe that the process is somewhat more reliable with 3-1/2" floppies, but I quit trying to make disk transfers when I got a cable. A Black Box with Floppy Board also works very well on 3-1/2" disks. The CSS-modified XF551 has a good PC reader utility (but can't write). And of course, a Happy 1050 has an OK transfer utility. There are a couple of other PC hardware cards that will allow transfers. Having said all that, APE with its PC-Mirror feature is the absolute "champion" for PC transfers. (IMO) nothing else comes close! I'm not sure if the PC-Mirror feature is available in the "trial" version of the software or not. -Larry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Velcro_SP Posted March 24, 2008 Share Posted March 24, 2008 Catweasel is a PCI card floppy disk controller that reads a bunch of old format. The sales website says it reads "Atari 9, 10 and 11 sektor disks... * Atari 800XL (all MFM formats, FM under developement)" and a lot of others. I'm not going to link the sales website because the guy who runs the company irked me by not supporting an OS I used when he could have done so. You can search or check Wikipedia if you're interested. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted March 25, 2008 Share Posted March 25, 2008 Catweasel is a PCI card floppy disk controller that reads a bunch of old format. I've got a Catweasel MkIV. Great card, no software to use most of it's capability. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a8isa1 Posted March 25, 2008 Share Posted March 25, 2008 (edited) Has anyone written a PC program to read Atari-formatted floppies in a 5.25" PC floppy drive? Or do I need an Atari-to-PC cable to get Atari disk files to a PC? I had good luck with Hias Reichl's WriteATR but my DD disks were formatted using an ATR8000 with 300 RPM, single sided drives. Not sure if this was an aid or not. Whatever the case, I was able to port better than 90% of my DD disks in this manner. For SD disks, single sided, I didn't have many options. I used an old PC program called Anadisk to make a raw dump and a second program, DEANA (DE-ANAdisk) which I believe flips the data bits and produces a .DCM file. Can't recall what I used to covert these to ATRs. To complicate matters. some of my Atari disks began life as PC disks (double sided). Anadisk did not like data existing on the 2nd side even though I requested single side analysis. What I did to make this method work is I first had to bulk erase a disk, so that side 2 would be blank, and use the Atari to create a copy of the original disk on this new disk. With the latter I could then use the Anadisk/DEANA process. This is all very tedious. I didn't own very many SD disks but I'd say I succesfully ported almost half of them. Eventually, I purchased a SIO2PC cable, which basically ended my need for the Anadisk/DEANA process. I never did find a direct means to port ATRs to single density disks. I no longer have a need to port real disks to ATRs but I still use WriteATR to produce real DD disks from ATRs. I also use it to produce 5.25" HD disks (formatted as 77 track, 1.0 MB capacity). The ATR8000 is old and slow but it was kind of fun getting HD floppies working for it. Also Hias was so great about adding the support for the disk format to WriteATR for me. - Steve Sheppard Edited March 25, 2008 by a8isa1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted March 25, 2008 Share Posted March 25, 2008 I never did find a direct means to port ATRs to single density disks. Using APE/Prosystem with the new SIO2PC devices it is very, very easy. You can mount the source ATR as a drive in APE and use a sector copier on the A8 itself to copy from the virtual source to the physical target. Or you can hook the A8 disk drive directly to the PC and use Prosystem to write out the ATRs to physical disks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+bf2k+ Posted March 25, 2008 Share Posted March 25, 2008 ProSystem is the way to go if you have 1050's. I currently have 4 1050's hooked to my Apebox PC. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawn Jefferson Posted March 25, 2008 Share Posted March 25, 2008 I love all of Steve's products for the 8-bit, but I had better luck imaging disks with the ATX imaging software (which isn't publically released yet unfotunately). It was faster, and I found it was able to image old disks that ProSystem just errored out on repeatedly. Take that with a grain of salt, since I wasn't using the very latest version, and I noticed that there are some additional options in the newest version. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
telengard Posted March 25, 2008 Share Posted March 25, 2008 Catweasel is a PCI card floppy disk controller that reads a bunch of old format. I've got a Catweasel MkIV. Great card, no software to use most of it's capability. They updated the software not too long ago and I've been working w/ jens to get .atr read/write support in there. It currently only supports xfd from what I can tell. But yes it still quite lacking in some areas. I wish he'd open source the thing. ~telengard Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+remowilliams Posted March 25, 2008 Share Posted March 25, 2008 I love all of Steve's products for the 8-bit, but I had better luck imaging disks with the ATX imaging software (which isn't publically released yet unfotunately). Yes, for protected disks VAPI has a much better capability for imaging. I've also used it and am looking forward to ijor's public release of the tools and write components. They updated the software not too long ago and I've been working w/ jens to get .atr read/write support in there. It currently only supports xfd from what I can tell. But yes it still quite lacking in some areas. I wish he'd open source the thing.~telengard Well that's good news. I'm glad someone is working at it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Defender II Posted March 30, 2008 Share Posted March 30, 2008 Copy II PC can copy many formats. There is even an ISA card that you could use with it to copy almost any disk. I know I have three of them somewhere. Haven't used them in years. Did pick up a NIB Copy II PC not too long ago. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TomVS Posted April 1, 2008 Share Posted April 1, 2008 As really new to the atari 800xl I tried to write atr images to real 5,25 discs using 551CONV on my amiga. The programs says it can write ATR´s to real atari discs. All the material I produced is not readable on my atari 1050 drive. The docs that come with the 551conv software on the amiga are somewhat on the cryptical side but I beleive it has something to do with the fact that it produces 551 compatible disc not 1050 ones. Has someone had any luck with the amiga program 551CONV? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TomVS Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 Just contacted the author of 551conv, the amiga program that writes atr disks in a standard amiga 5.25 drive, for use on the real atari 1050 drive. It works, no extra cable needed, it writes straight to the standard amiga drive... A few things to consider... -You need to write on floppy´s that were NOT used on an atari 1050 drive before because the head of an amiga drive is smaller, so the amiga head is not capable of erasing, overwriting all magnatized material on the floppy thus creating errors for the real 1050 drive to read. -You need atr files of +- 90kb or +- 130kb to match the size of real 1050 disks Many thanks to Achim Haertel, the author of 551conv to explain me everything after all these years. I hope this is info is useful to others Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Larry Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 Just contacted the author of 551conv, the amiga program that writes atr disks in a standard amiga 5.25 drive, for use on the real atari 1050 drive. It works, no extra cable needed, it writes straight to the standard amiga drive... A few things to consider... -You need to write on floppy´s that were NOT used on an atari 1050 drive before because the head of an amiga drive is smaller, so the amiga head is not capable of erasing, overwriting all magnatized material on the floppy thus creating errors for the real 1050 drive to read. -You need atr files of +- 90kb or +- 130kb to match the size of real 1050 disks Many thanks to Achim Haertel, the author of 551conv to explain me everything after all these years. I hope this is info is useful to others Thanks for the update. Yes, several of those types of utilities require new or "bulk-erased" diskettes. If you try this, please let us know how it works out for you. BTW, what is the original capacity of a SS or DS Amiga 5-1/4" disk? MFM recording? Atari 90K is FM. 130K is MFM. That might affect your results. (?) -Larry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TomVS Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 The 551conv utility works when using my old amiga formatted 5,25 disks. These disks contained 880K od data when formatted by the amiga... So far all my transferred disks seem to work... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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