What are the best disc tools to use with a Happy 1050

[Level42]

I bought a Happy from Steve about 2 years ago and installed it right away (a breeze). It has been working fine but I never used it intensily.

The floppy that came with it didn't work but Ive downloaded it now and ran all tests etc. and it's 100% OK.

 

I bought this sort of out of frustration from my youth because it took years before I could afford a 1050 but I never had the extra cash for a Happy.

 

Now.....I know it speeds up the loading and writing in general. However, I have some "menu" discs which seem to work in an even higher speed when loading (ís that "warp speed"). I have had these floppies since the mid 80s. They are not Multiboot and not Ndos menu's though, they have a blue screen and there is a white outlined box around the listed games.

 

I wonder which tool made these "warp speed" floppies.

 

Also, are there any other tools to convert Multiboot or Ndos floppies to this "warp speed" ?

 

I know it is probably silly to do this now while there are so much other ways of loading stuff but I just like to try it for the fun of it, I really like using a real 1050 drive still.

 

Also, I have some copied discs that have protection, Recue on Fractalus and Ballblazer, I know the Happy can copy these, but what tool is best for this ?

 

I know there are file-versions of the cartridge versions of these games but I love the intro screen of both games.

 

And also, what are the latest versions of Ndos and Multiboot ?

[Android8675]

All I know of Happy is what I watch my neighbor next door when he was making game copies, the only utils he used were the ones provided by Happy (I think v7.1 is the most recent). I recall he had a program called Happy Compactor that you ran, told it to record (or something), booted a game (copy protected, whatever) and the Happy drive would remember what tracks were loaded, once you did that you rebooted the Compactor util and it would then let you copy only the tracks with data onto a special disk. Since most games didn't use the whole disk you could effectively get 4-5 "full disk" games onto 1 high speed disk. I would find all the happy disks in ATR and use a SIO2PC to experiment.

 

Dunno what else he used, but this was in the 80s, today I would load up SpartaDOS 4 type init and format the disk for high speed skew. Once the disk is formated copy the data from the old disks to the new HS disks and see if that works.

[BillC]

There are many ATRs of software for use with Happy 1050s available on the Holmes CDs, here's a link to an FTP folder containing these images.

[Stormtrooper of Death]

You can also use the Happy for ATari <-> MS-DOS file transfers. (i did this in the 80s)

[+bf2k+]

Happy doesn't need a special sector skew for hi-speed.