Digitized: Ol' Hacker's Atari User Group Disk Library

[Savetz]

Background: The Ol' Hackers Atari User Group was based in New York. It began in December 1985 and disbanded in December 2000. (Information about the group's history is here: https://www.atariarchives.org/oldhackers/about.php) In 2000, group member Ron Fetzer loaned me the entire collection of OHAUG newsletters (which were published on disk), which I digitized and put online at https://www.atariarchives.org/oldhackers/

 

More recently: John Hardie at the National Videogame Museum lent me the OHAUG's entire public domain disk library, a trove of disks made available to its members: more than 650 double-sided disks. The collection, which spans 1987 through mid-1997, includes software written by members, shareware from various sources, and many disk newsletters and "disks of the month" created by other Atari users' groups around the world.

 

I digitized the OHAUG's library over a period of two months using an Applesauce floppy disk controller. The vast majority of the disks read with no issues and are now available as ATR files. 1,281 ATR files!

 

 

What exactly is on these disks? The OHAUG did a nice job of cataloging the contents of the disks — for the first 200 disks. After that, they apparently stopped. So I made an index (the most basic, one-line descriptions) based on the labels of disks 201 through 693 (the final disk.)  Some of the label descriptions are specific and helpful. Some are not, with generic names like "utilities" or just the name of user group that they came from.  

 

There is *so much* stuff on these disks to be explored and discovered. I hope the members of the Atari community take some time to dig in to the OHAUG's library and share what they find.

 

As a sample, here are some interesting things that I found while spot-checking the disks. (As far as I can tell, the following items aren't listed in AtariMania.)

469B Demo Disk: The Quik Pix by White Lion Software
499B DACE Xmas 1992 B - Video Love Letter by Thomas J. Starace (who I believe died just a few days ago)
646B ChickScratch 5.9 word processor by Robert E. Chik
676B The A.E.P. 8-Trace TTL Logic Analyzer by Alhart Enterprises

 

Here's the library itself:

OHAUG_library.zip

 

Here's the AppleSauce disk imaging logs:

OHAUG_ImagingLogs.zip

 

Here are the indexes of the disks contents:

OHAUG 001-200.txt

OHAUG 201-693.txt

OHAUG textfiledisks.txt

 

Enjoy,

—Kay

 

 

[tuf]

Wow what an effort!  Thanks for sharing your hard work!

[Paul Westphal]

Looks like my disk drive guy, Paul Alhart , was very busy back in the day. I sent this to him ..

[erichenneke]

Wow, this is amazing.  

[Calibus]

6 hours ago, Savetz said:

I digitized the OHAUG's library over a period of two months using an Applesauce floppy disk controller. The vast majority of the disks read with no issues and are now available as ATR files. 1,281 ATR files!

Can you describe your archiving setup?

Were you using an Apple II floppy drive?

If so - I thought the Apple II drives were 35 tracks - and Atari drives were 40 - so wouldn't you be possibly missing 5 tracks?

 

jim

 

[Mclaneinc]

Thank you Kay, totally above and beyond...Your dedication is amazing..Same goes out to all our archivers, amazing people.

 

Paul..

[bandit]

Very Nice, It took alot of time and effort, Thanks for your work !!

 

[Gunstar]

Yes! Thank you! If only the old AAAUG (Alamo Area Atari User Group-if I remembered the name right) disk library. I was a subscribing member in the last days, but never got around to checking out the PD library that I contributed graphic art too. I asked in previous years and have come across a couple old members, but nothing about the old library yet. All that graphic art of mine I lost my copies of years ago.

 

One thing listed in this library that caught my eye right away was the last item above; the 8-trace TTL logic analyzer.

[TGB1718]

2 hours ago, Calibus said:

Can you describe your archiving setup?

Were you using an Apple II floppy drive?

If so - I thought the Apple II drives were 35 tracks - and Atari drives were 40 - so wouldn't you be possibly missing 5 tracks?

 

jim

Don't worry, there's 40 tracks worth of data on some disks

 

[Savetz]

3 hours ago, Calibus said:

Can you describe your archiving setup?

Were you using an Apple II floppy drive?

If so - I thought the Apple II drives were 35 tracks - and Atari drives were 40 - so wouldn't you be possibly missing 5 tracks?

 

jim

 

 

I love the Applesauce floppy disk controller. It’s my favorite disk archiver by far. It’s fast and actively developed, and John Morris gives great support. It can’t make ATX files yet, but John says he is almost ready with that feature.

 

It works with IBM PC drives and Apple II drives.

 

The downside is this: Atari-compatible drives are tricky.

 

IBM PC drives can read the front, but not the back, of Atari disks. If you’re only reading front sides, this is fine. PC drives are cheap and plentiful. Applesauce does not support floppy-modified drives.

 

Although Apple II drives can read both sites of Atari disks, standard Apple II drives are only 36 tracks, so they can’t get all the data from Atari disks. A few third-party Apple drives did allow 40 tracks, so the Applesauce needs one of those to read Atari disks. 40-track Apple drives are hard to find. John found me a μ-SCI brand drive that fits the bill. Other brands (including Rana, I think) do the job too.

 

-Kay

 

Edited February 25, 2022 by Savetz

[+Stephen]

Wow - what a massive effort.  Thanks for doing this and sharing!

[+cjherr]

Thank you. What an amazing collection!

[+Larry]

I am stunned by the size and the work you did!  Amazing!  I always wanted to see what was in the OHAUG library.  I imagine that a few of the younger OHAUG group are still around.  Maybe Tom Hardy?  (I think that was his name.) 

[Mclaneinc]

19 minutes ago, Larry said:

I am stunned by the size and the work you did!  Amazing!  I always wanted to see what was in the OHAUG library.  I imagine that a few of the younger OHAUG group are still around.  Maybe Tom Hardy?  (I think that was his name.) 

Did you mean John Hardie?

 

That is who lent Jay the disks

Edited February 25, 2022 by Mclaneinc

[+Larry]

Yes, I see he is mentioned.  Didn't see that initially.

[JLsoft]

11 hours ago, Savetz said:

There is *so much* stuff on these disks to be explored and discovered. I hope the members of the Atari community take some time to dig in to the OHAUG's library and share what they find.

Oh man, thanks **so much** for doing this!

 

I saw that there was some NWPAC (North West Phoenix Atari Connection) stuff in there, so I had to check it out...

 

Went through a Christmas disk I know I had back then, watched a demo put together by the club's disk librarian that I probably skipped at the time, and just now saw that I was in the greets

 

 

Just this made my week!

[Savetz]

The files are also available at Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/ohaug-library

 

Next month, I'll make each individual disk downloadable and runnable in Internet Archive's browser-based Atari emulator.

 

-Kay

[eea]

Thanks so much for this amazing and laborious archiving effort, Kay!

[+orpheuswaking]

This is amazing! I've always wondered if their disk library survived. 

[mozzwald]

Awesome work!

 

I put these up on the fujinet.online tnfs server for anyone to try with FujiNet

[Atari_Ace]

Awesome! More disks than Bellcom, this is going to be a treasure trove.

 

I made a first pass through the files looking for metadata corruption or other errors to look into later (repairing disk collections is an occasional hobby of mine):

• At least 40 disks have byte 0x82 at sector offset 0x02 corruption in the DOS directories/vtoc, which are usually repairable. There are some disks though that are full of those errors and will likely be hard to fix (e.g. OHAUG238A.atr, OHAUG491A.atr, OHAUG596B.atr, OHAUG615B.atr have >100 sectors damaged).
• Another 35+ disks have empty sectors inside files, which will require tracking down another source for the files.  An example is OHAUG015A.atr, which is blank starting at sector 599, even though the disk looks like it should be nearly full.  The zeroed files are common ANALOG games, so easy to replace in this case.
• 8 disks have duplicates in the collection.  Half of these are side A and B are the same (OHAUG058A,B; OHAUG585A,B; OHAUG685A,B; OHAUG686A,B), so they might have been archived incorrectly.
• I only spotted one truncated disk, OHAUG563B.atr should have been a 130K disk.  It was probably duplicated incorrectly, I've seen this error in other user group archives occasionally.

This collection is going to keep me busy for awhile.  Hopefully it will help restore files in other user group archives.

 

[Savetz]

Thank you for checking the work, @Atari_Ace.

 

8 disks have duplicates in the collection.

 

That verifies what I found.

 

Half of these are side A and B are the same (OHAUG058A,B; OHAUG585A,B; OHAUG685A,B; OHAUG686A,B)

 

I checked the disks with MD5 before uploading and verified that those disks are actually the same on both sides. OHAUG058B is supposed to be documentation but isn't in reality.

 

Below are the notes I made about bad sectors while copying. Also the Applesauce ImagingLogs can be helpful.

 

I still have the disks — for now. I'll have to give them back eventually. So I can still check things or attempt copies on a real 1050 drive, for a while.

 

039B    bad sectors in track 1 in weird pattern
142B    4 bad sectors in last tracks
178A    1 bad sector
186B    1 bad sector
239A    1 bad sector
239B    8 bad sectors ("make copies on happy")
271B    7 bad sectors in last tracks
272A    1 bad sector (unimportant)
275B    5 bad sectors in last tracks
276B    2 bad sectors in last tracks
277B    2 bad sectors in last tracks
290A    1 bad sector
290B    9 bad sectors
305B    1 bad sector
311A    1 bad tracks Disk is labeled "use happy"
323B    many bad sectors in a weird pattern. Disk is labeled "use happy"
324A    track 18 bad (verified by label)
432B    1 bad sector
459B    1 bad sector
465A    2 bad sectors in boot tracks. Disk is labeled "use happy"
469A    some bad tracks. Label says "cannot copy"
469B    many bad tracks. Label says "cannot copy".
473B    1 bad sector
484B    8 bad sectors, but only DOS/DUP are damaged
537B    18 bad sectors
551B    4 bad sectors
565A    7 bad sectors including boot sectors
572B    1 bad sector (unimportant, disk is only DOS 2.0S)
635B    6 bad sectors
647A    many bad sectors
1BD    1 bad sector

 

[_The Doctor__]

I take you tried all the normal method of recovery, clean heads, cleaning disks, 287 286 rpm read, 289 290 rpm read etc... if not reading on a archiving drive... sometimes they read on the real thing... most archiving set up read in the 300's rpm range...

[Atari_Ace]

9 hours ago, Savetz said:

I still have the disks — for now. I'll have to give them back eventually. So I can still check things or attempt copies on a real 1050 drive, for a while.

Perhaps we can recover some of the bad sectors with a different drive, but probably not, and unless the disk contents are unusual it's probably not worth the effort.

 

I updated my disk parser to look for and do some basic analysis of PrintShop disks (there were quite a few in this collection) and I found at least a couple that have issues.

• OHAUG323A.atr: Sector 371 should be a directory sector, but it seems to be another random sector.  I reconstructed the 4 directory entries with placeholder names for now.
• OHAUG591A.atr: The last couple of directory sectors (392, 393) look corrupted.  The end of the sectors look like DOS files.  Since the data is mostly zeros, most of these entries should be ignored by PrintShop, but I just had to zero one additional byte to make the directory consistent.  I don't see any PrintShop files after the last valid entry, so I don't think anything was lost, but I should look more closely at this disk later.

The issues I'm seeing are common in all user group disk archives.  The fast hardware disk copiers had a bug that wrote 0x82 to the 3rd byte in a sector if some sequence of operations was done, and disks formats fade with time.  I'll post my fixed disks and my notes after I've had more time to examine the disks.

 

[Atari_Ace]

Cool, this archive has a set of Tyne & Wear (TWAUG) newsletter disks.  All the copies of those newsletters I've found on the internet before seem to come from the same source and some of the disks are clearly damaged.

 

For instance, issue 2 has severe 0x82 byte corruption and is essentially unusable.  In the past I'd started the process of repairing the damage, but with hundreds of sectors to fix and no other source for some of the content, it was unlikely I'd ever be able to completely repair the disks.  Imagine my delight when I noticed that OHAUG260A,B is that newsletter, and it doesn't have 0x82 byte corruptions.  In fact, using "cmp -l" I can verify the only differences in the files are the byte 0x82 corruptions.

 

The other two disks in the TWAUG collection I know have problems are 16B and 19A, and the OHAUG copies of those are identical to the ones previously archived, so no help there.