Anyone ever use tape to floppy transfer software for the 1050?

[Foebane]

I was given an Atari 1050 floppy drive at some point, and with it came some software. One of those items of software allowed me to take several Atari tape-based games, load them in, and then save and convert them into a version that was loadable from floppy. This was mostly a godsend, as I didn't need to load from tape those particular games anymore, and it would always load fast and reliably from floppy.

 

The problem with the software was that it didn't work with custom tape loaders or multi-part tape loaders, I was stuck there.

 

I cannot for the life of me remember what the software I used was named, or if there were others of its kind out there that could deal with all tape games. However, if anyone has experience of software like this, could they provide details and even screenshots if possible?

 

[+CharlieChaplin]

Errrrrmm yes,

 

I tried to convert approx. 825 tapes to diskette with C-Simulator and Emulator programs, like:

 

- Howfen tape to disk

- Multi tape or Multi cassette to disk by Vervan Software (original from 1982, buggy) and later Stocksoft (newer approx. 1985, bugfixed)

- C-Simulator by Ralf David

- C-Simulator V2 or II by Ralf David

- LDS C-Simulator by Ulf Petersen

- Transdisk IV (or 4)

- The Alchemist

 

and maybe a few others. These programs are all able to convert multi-stage tapes to diskette (alas, with limitations: Multitape to disk allows max. 8 parts, C:Sim and C:Sim V2 allow max. 16 parts; MultiTape has only 42.5 kbyte copy buffer, not enough for many tapes, etc.) Besides these, there are also dozens of programs that convert only single-stage tapes to disk, of the 825 commercial tapes I tested there were at least 120 single-stage boottapes, one can use e.g. Super-Copy by Peter Jakubek to convert them into a bootdisk or into a COM/XEX file.

 

Regarding tapes with non-standard blocks (longer than 128 bytes) by e.g. Novagen, The English Software and others, afaik, only Transdisk 4 is able to convert them to disk, all other programs above will fail (cannot load/copy them). From the author of Transdisk 4 comes also The Freezer!, one can use this program to load (with Start) almost all tapes with non-standard blocks and then freeze them onto diskette with Select+Option. On the other hand, most tape programs are already available as cracked COM/XEX fileversions, so if you want to save your time, simply use those fileversions...

 

http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-400-800-xl-xe-super-copy_15934.html

http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-400-800-xl-xe-transdisk-iv_15917.html

http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-400-800-xl-xe-alchemist-_37584.html

http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari-400-800-xl-xe-c-simulator_15938.html

http://www.atarionline.pl/v01/index.php?ct=utils&sub=6. Stacja dyskietek&tg=Howfen DOS#Howfen DOS

http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/holmes cd/Holmes 1/ATR Programs/Applications A-Z/LDS C Drive Emulator.atr

http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/holmes cd/Holmes 1/ATR Programs/Applications A-Z/Multi-Cassette to Disk.atr

http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/holmes cd/Holmes 1/ATR Programs/Applications A-Z/The Alchemist.atr

http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/holmes cd/Holmes 1/ATR Programs/Applications A-Z/Transdisk IV & Utils.atr

http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/holmes cd/Holmes 1/ATR Programs/Applications A-Z/Howfen Dos 3.08.atr

http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/holmes cd/Holmes 1/ATR Programs/Applications A-Z/Howfen Tape to Disk 1.0.atr

[Foebane]

8 hours ago, CharlieChaplin said:

These programs are all able to convert multi-stage tapes to diskette

In that case, I had some software then that couldn't do that. Guess no-one used those, then.

 

[BillC]

Transdisk IV v4.0 and v4.2 are available on the a8sp 2022-09-10 release.

Edited November 17, 2022 by BillC

[xrbrevin]

Multi-boot disks could copy tape to disk but it could not do multi-load tape games

[Rybags]

There's different ways to do it.

Back in the day you could just straight up copy a single-stage directly to raw sectors and have a bootable disk with minimal modification.

The problem there though is that you're usually just wasting several hundred sectors that go unused.

 

A variation on that is that you could do a 2 stage game and have a loader that keeps track of sector # and loads raw sectors.  I can't recall ever going that route.

 

The next step is to copy the raw tape data into a file then have a bootable menu loader that deals with them.  I have 1 such disk which contains the games I never bothered to convert to executables.

 

After that, the logical solution is to just convert the game to a binary load file which can be loaded from Dos and/or a menu loader, or in the modern day load XEX from emulator.

 

Additional to all this - I had a freeze-frame type dumper in development but never got it finished.  The technique there being that you have a Ram-based OS with hotkey that you hit to dump out RAM contents to disk then put into a file with a loader in front of it.

 

[Ely]

As others have already stated, I highly recommend Transdisk IV. I used it a lot in the mid/late 80s in the UK to put budget games onto floppies.