Atari Preservation Disk Utilities

Farb · March 10, 2018

A couple of months ago I started working on a new Atari 8-bit image comparison utility that had more capability than the existing tools I had been using including ATX files with weak sectors and enhanced density images. It has proven to be helpful and since others have been doing their own analysis of the various dumps being published, I thought it might be the right time to offer it to an extended audience.

It is a command-line utility that works on both Windows and Mac. Here are links to version 0.0.12:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/a8preservation.com/downloads/a8diskutils_macos_0_0_12.dmg

https://s3.amazonaws.com/a8preservation.com/downloads/a8diskutils_windows_0_0_12.zip

There are two executables in the bin directory:

a8diskcmp.exe will analyze two disk images to determine if they are identical
a8diskanal.exe will print out information about what protection it finds in an ATX image as documented on this page: http://a8preservation.com/#/guides/protection

I have also open-sourced the source code on Github. It is written in the Kotlin programming language and there are two components:

a8-disk-lib is a generic library for reading and accessing both ATR and ATX disk images (https://github.com/whizzosoftware/a8-disk-lib)
a8-disk-utils contains the actual command-line utilities that make use of a8-disk-lib (https://github.com/whizzosoftware/a8-disk-utils)

Hopefully others will find these useful tools.