Anybody willing to copy some DS/DD disks for me?

[Spire]

Hi,

 

Back in the day I used to run an Atari AMIS BBS, running on a 130XE with an ATR8000 using a mix of SS/DD and DS/DD drives. I still have my original AMIS BBS disks, but alas the only physical drive I have today is an Atari 810.

 

I believe these disks are DS/DD (360K) although they may be SS/DD (180K). They could even be a 35 track format; I recall having a Radio Shack drive in my 4 drive mix that was a 35 track, 160K drive. Being 28 years ago or so, I don't recall exactly how I had my drives arranged.

 

Would anybody with a drive that can read these disks be willing to try to convert them to ATR or other file types? It's a total of three 5 1/4" floppies disks to be converted.

 

Best regards,

Spire

 

 

[russg]

Hi,

 

Back in the day I used to run an Atari AMIS BBS, running on a 130XE with an ATR8000 using a mix of SS/DD and DS/DD drives. I still have my original AMIS BBS disks, but alas the only physical drive I have today is an Atari 810.

 

I believe these disks are DS/DD (360K) although they may be SS/DD (180K). They could even be a 35 track format; I recall having a Radio Shack drive in my 4 drive mix that was a 35 track, 160K drive. Being 28 years ago or so, I don't recall exactly how I had my drives arranged.

 

Would anybody with a drive that can read these disks be willing to try to convert them to ATR or other file types? It's a total of three 5 1/4" floppies disks to be converted.

 

Best regards,

Spire

 

 

I believe the ATR8000 allowed using PC type floppy drives, which were mostly 360K DS/DD drives. So, probably whoever can read these disks would have to have an ATR8000. Even then, it might be hard

to make a .ATR out of them. I think those old PC floppy disk drives were MFM type, AT something.

My MIO and Adaptec 4000A will connect a MFM drive to the Atari. I believe it will work with the old type PC floppy drives, I'm not sure. I don't have such a floppy drive, let me look on ebaY.

I just checked ebaY. Those old 5.25" floppy drives are $50 $75. I threw them out with old DOS PCs. Bottom line, if someone has one of those old 5.25" floppy drives, I think I can work

them with my MIO and 4000A. I think I can make .ATRs out of them, but they would be unusual ATRs.

 

Alternately, I believe it is possible to copy sectors to a file on an old x86 PC with Sydex ANADISK. From a sector copy, it isn't hard to make a .ATR.

 

This is theory. Atari floppies have their own boot sector and directory and DOS I'm not sure about. It would be impossible to make the first three sectors 128 byte, But I'm not sure that would

be necessary, I think Atari DD formatted floppies have 256 byte first three sectors anyway.

Edited March 3, 2014 by russg

[+Larry]

You can likely find someone a whole lot closer than me, but if you don't it sounds like an interesting challenge. If push came to shove, I do have an ATR8000. Assuming that the disks can be converted, do you want the physical disks returned? (If not possible, I'm sure you might want them back to possibly try again.) Send me a PM if interested.

 

-Larry

[Spire]

Thanks guys.

 

Russg, thanks for the hint on Anadisk. I knew that this program existed, but knowing the mfg. is helpful as I see they have documentation online!

 

I happen to have 2 5 1/4" drives to experiment with, provided I can find a computer that supports 5 1/4" drives in the BIOS. I'll check that out later today. I think if I'm able to rip the disks, I'll be able to find an ATR or other format that will work (these disks I believe have MyDos or SpartDOS OSes on them; nothing exotic to the Atari).

 

Larry, I appreciate the offer of help, and suspect I'll end up having to take you up on it, but I'll give ANADISK a crack first.

 

Best regards,

Ron

[russg]

Hi,

 

Back in the day I used to run an Atari AMIS BBS, running on a 130XE with an ATR8000 using a mix of SS/DD and DS/DD drives. I still have my original AMIS BBS disks, but alas the only physical drive I have today is an Atari 810.

 

I believe these disks are DS/DD (360K) although they may be SS/DD (180K). They could even be a 35 track format; I recall having a Radio Shack drive in my 4 drive mix that was a 35 track, 160K drive. Being 28 years ago or so, I don't recall exactly how I had my drives arranged.

 

Would anybody with a drive that can read these disks be willing to try to convert them to ATR or other file types? It's a total of three 5 1/4" floppies disks to be converted.

 

Best regards,

Spire

 

 

I think to use the disks from ATR8000, you need a special DOS. Something like OS/A + from Optimized Systems. That means it isn't compatible with MyDOS or SpartaDOS, if my

guess is correct. Do you remember what DOS your disks have on them?

I don't know what you're trying to accomplish, being able to run your old software I guess.

[+Larry]

ATR8000's were originally sold with MyDos. C. Marslett participated with this group, writing special drivers to use the other hardware features of the ATR8000. (RS232, HD, etc.)

 

-Larry

[Mathy]

Hello guys

 

Where can one find a MyDOS version with ATR8x00 support. Hmm, let me guess....

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

[Spire]

Pretty sure the disks are MyDOS. But, it's been a while. As I recall, the ATR8000 drives would read most any DOS or format (SD, DD, DS, DD) I threw at it. I'm guessing enhanced density may have been an issue (never messed with enhanced density drives), and I don't recall it liking copy protected disks, I suspect for a number of reasons including drive RPM (300 vs 288).

 

As far as what I'm trying to accomplish, basically I'm just converting all my old disks before they are lost to the ravages of time. These are the only DD disks I have in my collection, and I thought it would be fun to not only review my old BBS files (see the old message boards, user names ,etc) but it'd also be fun to just poke around with the old software. I did some fun stuff with RAMDisks, dynamically loading more BASIC code on the fly back in the day (AMIS maxed out the RAM), etc.

[+Larry]

Do let us know how you make out with Anadisk. We're always interested inhow folks make out with the "resurrection" projects.

 

-Larry

[a8isa1]

Thanks guys.

 

Russg, thanks for the hint on Anadisk. I knew that this program existed, but knowing the mfg. is helpful as I see they have documentation online!

 

I happen to have 2 5 1/4" drives to experiment with, provided I can find a computer that supports 5 1/4" drives in the BIOS. I'll check that out later today. I think if I'm able to rip the disks, I'll be able to find an ATR or other format that will work (these disks I believe have MyDos or SpartDOS OSes on them; nothing exotic to the Atari).

 

Larry, I appreciate the offer of help, and suspect I'll end up having to take you up on it, but I'll give ANADISK a crack first.

 

Best regards,

Ron

Oh! This brings back memories!

 

If you are going to the trouble of setting up an old PC, PC DOS, and a 5.25" drive do give Hias Reichl's WriteATR a try. I used this combination to convert nearly all my DD disks to ATRs and I only had 5.25" HD drives to work with.

 

All my DD disks were originally written on an ATR8000 which makes them very compatible with WriteATR.

 

If you are lucky you will have a disk controller that will support single density FM disks.

 

I wasn't so lucky. I didn't have an FM friendly controller in any computer I tried (perhaps 9 machine over the years). Also tried a handful of floppy/HDD/multi I/O cards.

 

Hopefully you luck will be better.

 

Not having a working SIO2PC cable at the time I also tried the Anadisk/De-Ana process. I had issues that you might not have but even if you don't it's very slow process. I managed to convert about 60% of my SD disks. At the time I wasn't very happy about that but I discovered I didn't have anything of consequence, anyway. Mostly incomplete programs, a few type-ins, some example code snippets perhaps. That's about it.

 

As for the Anadisk/DeAna process ideally all you do is run the dump option of Anadisk. (version 6 worked better than version 7 for this purpose). IIRC this took considerable time. I think about an hour but I wouldn't be surpised if it takes 3 hours. Hard to remember something I did 8 or 9 years ago. Deana is straight forward. It takes the dump file you created and flips the data bits. It generates a .DCM file (IIRC). At the time I used Atari800Win Plus emulator to copy the .DCM file contents to a .ATR. Nowadays I know I can just tack and ATR header on the file. Done.

 

Now, that's how the process works ideally. Here are the extra step I had to use.

 

All my A8 disks were single sided. None of them were "flippies" but many, even most, were recycled PC floppies. Anadisk, allows you to select which side of the disk you want to analyze/extract data from BUT it gets confused if you are doing a dump. It doesn't like having data on side B and generates an unusable dump.

 

To solve this problem I needed to bulk erase some disks, do a disk copy from my original single density disks to the newly erased disks, and then I could start the Anadisk/DeAna process.

 

Another time killer was a lot of head cleaning required on both the A8 drives and the PC drives, especially the latter. Anadisk dump routine is intensive.

 

Eventually, the troublesome SIO2PC was replaced (and I made several since). I also, realized how much simpler it was to use an atari, the SIO2PC cable, and a disk emulator to generate ATRs than to use the above process. Hindsight is wonderful.

 

Good luck, Spire!

Edited March 4, 2014 by a8isa1

[Spire]

Hi All,

 

A quick update.

 

I went ahead and installed a 5.25" drive (1.2M) in my computer. After figuring out how to configure Anadisk to use the drive, to my surprise I was able to read the disks fine (except for track 0). It was able to read both SD and DD disks. However, once I had the disk image I realized I still had an issue since DeAna only supports SS/SD disk images and my disks were DD.

 

So, next step was WriteATR. Unfortunately WriteATR and my floppy controller didn't get along. I thought I was stuck, but as a last ditch effort I moved the 5.25" drive to another computer (Core 2 processor, so not that old of a motherboard, certainly not XT class or anything) and viola - the magic combination was discovered! WriteATR was happy, and using the -F1 switch, I was able to successfully create ATR files for several of my DD disks...

 

The moment of truth was in actually trying to load these into my Atari. At first it didn't look promising, with BOOT ERROR and/or lockups, but when I used a good MyDOS boot disk, I'm able to explore the disks (I believe these disks were actually non-bootable years ago, based on some of the creatively named files I found in the directory). Even loaded up the old AMIS BBS software, and got the awesome message of [AlterDimension 11/23/85] (my old BBS name). So, more work to be done but at least I'm getting somewhere.

 

Thanks all for the encouragement. I knew these tools existed, and even had downloaded them in the past, but never actually bothered to try to get them to work since I had read such mixed results. Glad I finally gave it a shot...

 

Even got lucky in that both a 5.25" drive I got from a friend and a combo 5.25"/3.5" I bought at the Goodwill Computer Outlet worked perfectly on these old disks.

Edited March 6, 2014 by Spire

[_The Doctor__]

Awesome...that is the success story we all like to here