Archiving my floppies: Am I doing this the right way?

[SlagOMatic]

The goal is to turn my collection of ~180 two-sided "flippies" into disk images that I can back up/store elsewhere.

 

My process:

 

1. Boot into FujiNet (which has a 32GB SD card).
2. Create a new disk image (saved to the SD card) that matches the formatting/type of the physical floppy.
3. Mount that disk image into drive slot 2.
4. Turn on floppy drive (D1). Insert CopyMate floppy disk, reboot.
5. Remove CopyMate disk. Insert physical floppy that I want to copy into D1.
6. Tell CopyMate to copy from D1 to D2.
7. Wait for copy to complete.
8. Remove physical floppy, turn off D1.
9. Reboot back into FujiNet.
10. Unmount the disk image from drive slot 2.
11. Repeat from step 2 for each additional floppy.

 

I've confirmed this process works, and the resulting disk images can be read by my Atari emulator on my iMac which is all different colors of strange to see.

 

I know I can speed things up a bit by creating a single disk image in FujiNet, then moving the SD card to my iMac and duplicating that disk image a bunch of times. Then I could mount seven disk images at once (from D2-D8), copy seven physical floppies onto seven disk images, then reboot into FujiNet, load up the next set of blank images, and repeat.

 

Is there a smarter way to do this?

[Teapot]

Make an ATR of the CopyMate disk on the SD card and boot from that. Set the real drive to D2:. Less swapping and less wear.

 

I don't know how CopyMate works but if it's possible to run it from a command line DOS you could use the FEJECT and FMOUNT FujiNet commands to switch mounted disk images without rebooting.

 

[TZJB]

10 hours ago, SlagOMatic said:

The goal is to turn my collection of ~180 two-sided "flippies" into disk images that I can back up/store elsewhere.

 

My process:

 

1. Boot into FujiNet (which has a 32GB SD card).
2. Create a new disk image (saved to the SD card) that matches the formatting/type of the physical floppy.
3. Mount that disk image into drive slot 2.
4. Turn on floppy drive (D1). Insert CopyMate floppy disk, reboot.
5. Remove CopyMate disk. Insert physical floppy that I want to copy into D1.
6. Tell CopyMate to copy from D1 to D2.
7. Wait for copy to complete.
8. Remove physical floppy, turn off D1.
9. Reboot back into FujiNet.
10. Unmount the disk image from drive slot 2.
11. Repeat from step 2 for each additional floppy.

 

I've confirmed this process works, and the resulting disk images can be read by my Atari emulator on my iMac which is all different colors of strange to see.

 

I know I can speed things up a bit by creating a single disk image in FujiNet, then moving the SD card to my iMac and duplicating that disk image a bunch of times. Then I could mount seven disk images at once (from D2-D8), copy seven physical floppies onto seven disk images, then reboot into FujiNet, load up the next set of blank images, and repeat.

 

Is there a smarter way to do this?

 

Yes, I agree with @Teapot. Set the copy from disk to physical D2: and boot from and then mount the blank image to D1: on the Fujinet, but manage the disk images from the Web Config without rebooting the Atari. You do need another PC to do that of course as it is done over your LAN. See https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-platformio/wiki/Atari-FujiNet-Quickstart-Guide#connecting-your-fujinet. Web Config is near the bottom of the page.

 

Alternatively, I found Copymate very restrictive in drive number support, so I use the Happy 7.1 sector copier which can use the extra 130XE memory. That way you can mount and copy to Fujinet mounted ATR images up to D8:.

 

The main issue I have when duplicating disks to ATR is knowing the source disk density as it is crucial to mount the correctly sized blank ATR to copy to. I have no solution for that except to boot MyDOS 4.5 which displays disk drive density when a directory is requested. I really need a disk density indicator on my 1050 drive.

 

Duplicating the blank disk images will also speed things up, just keep a record of what disk is copied to what image if you are not naming them straightaway.

[+CharlieChaplin]

There are several sectorcopy programs that will show a directory AND disk density before you start copying the diskette. One of them is Diskcopy from TurboDOS XL/XE. It supports D1: to D4:, write verify, four floppy speeders (Happy, Speedy, XF, Turbo), 90k/130k/180k/360k and many other things. But it does not support Pokey divisor 1 or zero (think it is limited to max. Pokey divisor 6 or maybe 4 ?). And if your floppy speeder does not match one of the four types, it works with 1x SIO only. It supports XRAM (up to 320KB), but when using two drives for copying it does not make use of the XRAM (XRAM is only used when copying with one drive).

 

Usage:

- when booted press ESC for the options menu and a cursor will appear

- use up and down (cursor keys without Control key) to move cursor, press Return to change an option (e.g. disk drives)

- set "Quit on empty sector" to "off"  (this is for DOS 2.x disks and not usefull when copying bootdisks or other disks)

- set cursor on "Show Directory" and press Return to show the directory AND disk density

- press ESC again to leave the options menu when you are done with the setup (you can change it again whenever you want)

- press Return to start copying  (if you forgot something in the setup, press START to interrupt copying and go back to the options menu; note: you can change most options and still continue copying where you left, except one option: Show Directory uses memory and thus you have to restart copying from the beginning...)

- when copying is done hold SELECT and press Reset to coldstart the computer and leave this copy program

 

 

DISKCOPY_TurDOS.zip

[TZJB]

1 hour ago, CharlieChaplin said:

There are several sectorcopy programs that will show a directory AND disk density before you start copying the diskette. One of them is Diskcopy from TurboDOS XL/XE. It supports D1: to D4:, write verify, four floppy speeders (Happy, Speedy, XF, Turbo), 90k/130k/180k/360k and many other things. But it does not support Pokey divisor 1 or zero (think it is limited to max. Pokey divisor 6 or maybe 4 ?). And if your floppy speeder does not match one of the four types, it works with 1x SIO only. It supports XRAM (up to 320KB), but when using two drives for copying it does not make use of the XRAM (XRAM is only used when copying with one drive).

 

Usage:

- when booted press ESC for the options menu and a cursor will appear

- use up and down (cursor keys without Control key) to move cursor, press Return to change an option (e.g. disk drives)

- set "Quit on empty sector" to "off"  (this is for DOS 2.x disks and not usefull when copying bootdisks or other disks)

- set cursor on "Show Directory" and press Return to show the directory AND disk density

- press ESC again to leave the options menu when you are done with the setup (you can change it again whenever you want)

- press Return to start copying  (if you forgot something in the setup, press START to interrupt copying and go back to the options menu; note: you can change most options and still continue copying where you left, except one option: Show Directory uses memory and thus you have to restart copying from the beginning...)

- when copying is done hold SELECT and press Reset to coldstart the computer and leave this copy program

 

 

DISKCOPY_TurDOS.zip 4.18 kB · 3 downloads

This looks interesting thanks. Will it copy non-Atari DOS disks like SpartaDOS and Print Shop icon disks?

[+DjayBee]

5 hours ago, TZJB said:

I use the Happy 7.1 sector copier which can use the extra 130XE memory.

IIRC the biggest drawback of the Happy sector copier is that it aborts copying if it encounters a bad sector.

[SenorRossie]

I don't think there's a right or wrong way to archive a/your floppy collection. I documented my own steps here: https://github.com/senorrossie/sh-archive2atr

 

I am not that familiar with fujinet, but swapping floppies (and using the right format/size) is probably the most work.

[SlagOMatic]

22 hours ago, Teapot said:

Make an ATR of the CopyMate disk on the SD card and boot from that. Set the real drive to D2:. Less swapping and less wear.

 

I don't know how CopyMate works but if it's possible to run it from a command line DOS you could use the FEJECT and FMOUNT FujiNet commands to switch mounted disk images without rebooting.

Thanks for this. I tried it out and it works "mostly" like a charm (I will post a follow up below).

 

CopyMate doesn't run from command line. I used to use it extensively back in the day. The three things I like the most about it are that it uses the extended RAM in my RAMBO XL so it'll read an entire disk at once, you can make multiple copies (writes) from a single read (handy during "copy parties"), and you don't have to tell it anything about the disk you're copying from. Feed it a SD, ED, or DD disk in whatever format you like and it'll make a perfect copy of it. (Copy protection notwithstanding, of course.)

[SlagOMatic]

11 hours ago, TZJB said:

Alternatively, I found Copymate very restrictive in drive number support, so I use the Happy 7.1 sector copier which can use the extra 130XE memory. That way you can mount and copy to Fujinet mounted ATR images up to D8:.

I'm curious about your comment about CopyMate being restrictive in drive number support, because I'm running into a minor issue in that regard. In FujiNet I'm mounting six blank ATR images at once (D3 through D8), then booting to a CopyMate ATR image in D1, and using D2 as my read source. This is what I get:

• Read D2, write D3 = No issues.
• Read D2, write D4 = No issues.
• Read D2, write D5 = No issues.
• Read D2, write D6 = D2 reads without issue, but the write fails immediately (as if the disk wasn't in the drive).
• Read D2, write D7 = D2 won't read, therefore it errors out before the write.
• Read D2, write D8 = D2 won't read, therefore it errors out before the write.

I know it's not an issue with the ATR file because I can swap it from (for example) D6 to D3 and it works perfectly there.

[+CharlieChaplin]

9 hours ago, TZJB said:

This looks interesting thanks. Will it copy non-Atari DOS disks like SpartaDOS and Print Shop icon disks?

 

Yes, Diskcopy will copy any (unprotected!) 90k - 360k A8 disk, simply set "Quit on empty sector?" to "off" (as mentioned above) and it will copy all sectors from start to end. You can load the Diskcopy program from DOS, Gamedos, Bootloader/XEX-loader, etc.

[SlagOMatic]

An update, because I think documenting this will help me (and maybe others) going forward. I've got 22 disks (two-sided) imaged to 44 files. These are all "compilation" disks containing games that I'd downloaded from BBS's in the past. Fortunately I was good about noting disk densities on the sleeves so this went with few hiccups.

 

Things I've learned...

 

You can swap disk images using the FujiNet web config page and NOT need to reboot the FujiNet afterwards. Thanks to TZJB for the heads-up on that one.

 

For reasons unknown, I can't copy (write) to any image mounted in D6, D7, or D8. I don't know if this is a shortcoming in CopyMate or elsewhere. It doesn't matter if the image is stored on my local SD card or on my server. I haven't dug into this deeper yet; when I have time this week I'll create a few dummy images and see if I can format/read/write to/from them in SpartaDOS and see what happens.

 

There seems to be a few bugs in the disk swapping mechanism, or at least the tracking of it. Or maybe I just don't understand it fully yet. If I reboot FujiNet, insert three disk images (into D3-D5), reboot to my copying process, copy three disks in sequence, and reboot FujiNet again, both the FujiNet boot page and web config correctly show the disk images inserted into the respective drives. This works as expected. But if I use web config exclusively to swap disk images (again, three at a time into D3-D5) a few times, then something odd happens. Normally when I insert an image I get "operation successful" immediately, but once in awhile it'll take 5-10 seconds for "operation successful" to appear. When this happens the copy process will fail on that image. Web config shows that it's mounted but it's not. At this point sometimes I can eject the mounted image and re-mount it; if "operation successful" comes up immediately then I'm good, but more often than not it still takes 5-10 seconds and will again fail on the copy process. I then have to reboot FujiNet. When I get back to the boot menu the disk images FujiNet says are mounted are NOT the disk images that web config says are mounted. Web config may say (for example) disk17.atr is mounted, but the boot menu says that disk11.atr is mounted. And this is true of all three drives (D3-D5); web config may say I'm using disks 17-19 while the boot menu says I'm using disks 9-11. Clearing those three mount points in the boot menu, then mounting the correct images there, resolves the problem -- for awhile, until it has that 5-10 second delay again.

 

Using the FujiNet boot menu, creating a new UNIQUE image works fine but creating a REPLACEMENT image has a problem. In short, if you try to overwrite an existing image with a new image of a different size, EITHER the new image fails to be created OR the new image is the same size as the old image. In my case, I created a 180K disk22.atr file and mounted it in D5. Ran through my copy process and it failed; I realized my physical disk 22 is a 130K disk. I rebooted FujiNet and created a new 130K image using the same disk22.atr filename and storing it in the same location. The image was seemingly created and I was prompted to mount it, which I did in D5 (where the previous wrong-size image was). I went back to my copy process and it failed again. I checked the image on my Mac and discovered disk22.atr is a 180K image file. So I think one of two things may have happened. Either (a) the 180K disk22.atr file wasn't overwritten because it was an active file (it was mounted) and the new 130K file wasn't created but no error message was generated, or (b) the 180K disk22.atr file WAS overwritten but the 130K replacement file turned into a 180K replacement during its creation. Manually deleting the file from my Mac, then creating a new file of the appropriate size through the FujiNet boot menu, works.

[TZJB]

22 hours ago, DjayBee said:

IIRC the biggest drawback of the Happy sector copier is that it aborts copying if it encounters a bad sector.

 

I do actually prefer the Happy sector copier because it aborts the copy on a bad sector. Then I know there is a problem that may need to be addressed.

 

13 hours ago, SlagOMatic said:

You can swap disk images using the FujiNet web config page and NOT need to reboot the FujiNet afterwards. Thanks to TZJB for the heads-up on that one.

 

For reasons unknown, I can't copy (write) to any image mounted in D6, D7, or D8. I don't know if this is a shortcoming in CopyMate or elsewhere. It doesn't matter if the image is stored on my local SD card or on my server. I haven't dug into this deeper yet; when I have time this week I'll create a few dummy images and see if I can format/read/write to/from them in SpartaDOS and see what happens.

 

 

I think we need to establish what version of Copymate you are using as the versions that I have will only allow D1: to D4:. Could you please upload the version of Copymate that you use as an ATR image? Then I would like to try to reproduce this issue. Thanks.

 

I just found another thread that tackles sector copier programs:-

 

 

Edited April 3, 2023 by TZJB

[SlagOMatic]

5 hours ago, TZJB said:

 

I do actually prefer the Happy sector copier because it aborts the copy on a bad sector. Then I know there is a problem that may need to be addressed.

 

I think we need to establish what version of Copymate you are using as the versions that I have will only allow D1: to D4:. Could you please upload the version of Copymate that you use as an ATR image? Then I would like to try to reproduce this issue. Thanks.

CopyMate won't abort the copy on a bad sector, but it will show/tell you that there's a bad sector during the read process (and verify process, if applicable).

 

I'm using CopyMate 4.4 which I downloaded from the TOSEC archive on archive.org.

 

https://archive.org/details/Atari_8_bit_TOSEC_2012_04_23

     6428  2013-02-28 02:48   Atari 8 bit [TOSEC]/Applications/[ATR] (TOSEC-v2011-08-24_CM)/Copymate v4.4 (1987)(Palmer, Mike - Hillery, R.)(US).zip

I'll put it in my Dropbox when I get home tonight.

 

It definitely sees drives higher than 4. If I have D1,D3-D8 mounted in FujiNet and D2 as the physical drive I'm able to rotate through all eight drives as either the source or destination, and I'm able to write to D5 without issues.

[+CharlieChaplin]

Here are six "Copymate" programs. Please note that Copymate 4.3 and 4.4 will not fully read/write/copy 130k (the 1050 enhanced density), only the first 720 sectors, so better don't use them with a 130k diskette. Besides, Copymate 4.4 comes with a .DOC file on the disk which Copymate 4.3 lacks.

 

COPYMATE.zip

[MVladimir]

Hope my "story" is similar for this topic, so I post it here.

I'm in process to archive my large collection (300-350) of discs (30-35 years old!) and I have a hard time archiving them using first Kafar, then check the contents with ATR tools, then checking them with Altira and finally with the real Atari. After that I compare some of them with similar content and try to "assemble" something similar to the "original disk" in ATR format on PC.

I have an idea to make a "station" using an AspeQt/RespeQt  on PC connected via Lotarek's 10502PC/Sio2PC USB with an LDW Super 2000 disk drive (INDUS GT clone).

Booting from virtual disk D1 on the PC; D2 is reserved as the source from real floppy in LDW, all other possible disks can be used as destination for copies.

All copies can be checked immediately on the PC in the same program, we use sector copiers and run them on the original Atari 8bit machine, we can check the archive copy on PC with  Altira or run it on the Atari without connecting/reconnecting cables. I want using MyDOS 4.55b3 as the OS - it supports 8 drives, but the D8 is a RAMdrive, so we have 5 free drives for the new ATRs, one for boot and one as source.

Do we have copy programs with the same functionality as Copymate, but for enhanced density and/or for all densities?

How about this idea? Any suggestions are welcome, especially regarding software.

[+CharlieChaplin]

Copymate 3.8 which is available in the Copymate.ZIP above supports at least 4 drives (maybe more, did not check), ultraspeed for Happy and USD (but not Speedy or Hyper-XF), five formats: 90k/130k/180k/360k/720k and up to 320k RAM afaik. In my eyes this version is much better than the Copymate 4.3 and 4.4 versions. But it also requires a minimum of 128k RAM to work and if you don't have Happy or USD, then it only uses 1x SIO...

 

There is also Disk Duplication 2.0 that works e.g. under MyDOS, one can use it to copy disks (up to 720k) or sectors (up to 65,000 sectors?). But one has to go through several menus and submenus to do so. If MyDOS is setup for a ramdisk, then Disk Duplication can use it (up to 1MB, minus approx. 100 sectors that are unused so it can jump back to DUP.SYS) and if you load or better copy+append an ultraspeed driver (e.g. by Bob Woolley) in front of it, it will also work with ultraspeed. Think it supports up to 8 drives (where drive 8 can be the ramdisk), but this might also be DOS-dependant... regarding disk formats:

 

90k = 40 tracks, single sided, single density

130k = 40 tracks, single sided, 1050 dual density

180k = 40 tracks, single sided, double density

360k = 40 tracks, double sided, double density

720k = 80 tracks, double sided, double density

 

You have to choose the correct format from several menus and submenus (the program also offers 77 tracks) and errrmmm, the program does not display the density or the format of the diskette, so you have to know it before-hand, if you choose the wrong one... bad luck!

 

Weren't there special copy programs for the LDW drive (similar to the ones for TOMS drives) ?

 

 

Disk_Dup_20.zip

[MVladimir]

2 hours ago, CharlieChaplin said:

Copymate 3.8 which is available in the Copymate.ZIP above supports at least 4 drives (maybe more, did not check), ultraspeed for Happy and USD (but not Speedy or Hyper-XF), five formats: 90k/130k/180k/360k/720k and up to 320k RAM afaik. In my eyes this version is much better than the Copymate 4.3 and 4.4 versions. But it also requires a minimum of 128k RAM to work and if you don't have Happy or USD, then it only uses 1x SIO...

 

There is also Disk Duplication 2.0 that works e.g. under MyDOS, one can use it to copy disks (up to 720k) or sectors (up to 65,000 sectors?). But one has to go through several menus and submenus to do so. If MyDOS is setup for a ramdisk, then Disk Duplication can use it (up to 1MB, minus approx. 100 sectors that are unused so it can jump back to DUP.SYS) and if you load or better copy+append an ultraspeed driver (e.g. by Bob Woolley) in front of it, it will also work with ultraspeed. Think it supports up to 8 drives, but never tested it... regarding disk formats:

 

90k = 40 tracks, single sided, single density

130k = 40 tracks, single sided, 1050 dual density

180k = 40 tracks, single sided, double density

360k = 40 tracks, double sided, double density

720k = 80 tracks, double sided, double density

 

You have to choose the correct format from several menus and submenus (the program also offers 77 tracks) and errrmmm, the program does not display the density or the format of the diskette, so you have to know it before-hand, if you choose the wrong one... bad luck!

 

Copymate is fine if you don't need a copying of "unknown"density disks... Not of all of them in my collection have a marking of density (we mark part of them when start use 35 years ago) and a lot of them written under SuperDOS 2.9/5.1 in different densities - for today is unknown.....

I can use 130XE with 320k RAMBO mod, unmodded 130XE, 800XE with 130k mem, Lotarek's 10502PC/Sio2PC USB, LDW Super 2000 disk drives (clone of Indus GT), WIN10 or WIN7 PC. LDW can support single side 40 tracks SD/DD/ED disks. I never have double sided Atari disk drives here in russia.

Anyway I check to use  Disk Duplication for see the result.

Not sure that there are some special sector copying software for LDW drive. Originally it comes with 2.35 DOS XL and it possible "duplicate disk" inside OS, same as in every other DOS. I need check something similar for "parent" disk drive - Indus GT. As I remember 30 years ago we use some programs for sector copy and editing disk, unfortunately until now I can't find this disks in my collection. Something like "US doubler" or similar.... not sure. Dark interface, red or dark red with yellow characters.... as I remember. But we only had the 800XL at the time, and the LDW and a working Microprint with a large dot matrix printer were sometimes brought in on the weekends from friends at the movie studio. No PC, no emulators .. late 80s, early 90s ... History ..... It was the heyday of the popularity of home-made Sinclair computers in our country, and few people knew about Atari, they were sometimes brought from Poland - beautiful graphics, sound and a lot of games on cartridges, which was better than a homemade Sinclair. 😊

 

Update: Disk Duplication checked - nice prog, but it take 3-4 times more time to copy disk, Kafar faster, but it under Windows. If you know density of disk, duplicator works ...

Edited April 5, 2023 by MVladimir
Small update

[+SoulBuster]

I use Copymate quite a bit.  If you use it with Sparta Dos X, Copymate will recognize all 8 drives.

[Ely]

8 hours ago, MVladimir said:

Copymate is fine if you don't need a copying of "unknown"density disks... Not of all of them in my collection have a marking of density (we mark part of them when start use 35 years ago) and a lot of them written under SuperDOS 2.9/5.1 in different densities - for today is unknown.....

I'm curious, is there a program that can detect what format a floppy is? I've got quite a few disks were I'm not sure what they are.

[+SoulBuster]

SDX, use chkdsk.  IF it recognizes the floppy, it will tell you.

[TZJB]

On 4/3/2023 at 9:48 PM, SlagOMatic said:

CopyMate won't abort the copy on a bad sector, but it will show/tell you that there's a bad sector during the read process (and verify process, if applicable).

 

I'm using CopyMate 4.4 which I downloaded from the TOSEC archive on archive.org.

 

https://archive.org/details/Atari_8_bit_TOSEC_2012_04_23

     6428  2013-02-28 02:48   Atari 8 bit [TOSEC]/Applications/[ATR] (TOSEC-v2011-08-24_CM)/Copymate v4.4 (1987)(Palmer, Mike - Hillery, R.)(US).zip

I'll put it in my Dropbox when I get home tonight.

 

It definitely sees drives higher than 4. If I have D1,D3-D8 mounted in FujiNet and D2 as the physical drive I'm able to rotate through all eight drives as either the source or destination, and I'm able to write to D5 without issues.

 

I am downloading that TOSEC file now so I will find it later.

 

Otherwise I am not having much luck. I already have Copymate 4.4 from the post I found by @CharlieChaplin in 2019. It is a non-DOS bootable disk and only allows 2 drives D1: and D2: and directory display from the same.

 

Copymate XE 3.8 seems a bit better but is only supporting 4 drives even loading with MyDOS 4.53 and SpartaDOS 3.3a and will not allow directory display.

 

I tried DISKCOPY, again from @CharlieChaplin post 4 above, and that supports 4 drives and does allow directory display which also indicates disk density when a directory is requested. It also has some useful copy options and can skip bad sectors and even has 4 at the end of it's own ATR disk image for some reason!

 

No other copier I have tried so far supports more than 4 drives and most only 2. (Except Happy Sector Copier).

 

10 hours ago, SoulBuster said:

I use Copymate quite a bit.  If you use it with Sparta Dos X, Copymate will recognize all 8 drives.

 

SpartaDOS X requires a cartridge I believe? I am trying to avoid that at the moment and just using disk based DOS. Nevertheless, could you post your version of Copymate please?

 

 

[TZJB]

15 hours ago, MVladimir said:

Hope my "story" is similar for this topic, so I post it here.

I'm in process to archive my large collection (300-350) of discs (30-35 years old!) and I have a hard time archiving them using first Kafar, then check the contents with ATR tools, then checking them with Altira and finally with the real Atari. After that I compare some of them with similar content and try to "assemble" something similar to the "original disk" in ATR format on PC.

I have an idea to make a "station" using an AspeQt/RespeQt  on PC connected via Lotarek's 10502PC/Sio2PC USB with an LDW Super 2000 disk drive (INDUS GT clone).

Booting from virtual disk D1 on the PC; D2 is reserved as the source from real floppy in LDW, all other possible disks can be used as destination for copies.

All copies can be checked immediately on the PC in the same program, we use sector copiers and run them on the original Atari 8bit machine, we can check the archive copy on PC with  Altira or run it on the Atari without connecting/reconnecting cables. I want using MyDOS 4.55b3 as the OS - it supports 8 drives, but the D8 is a RAMdrive, so we have 5 free drives for the new ATRs, one for boot and one as source.

Do we have copy programs with the same functionality as Copymate, but for enhanced density and/or for all densities?

How about this idea? Any suggestions are welcome, especially regarding software.

 

I agree that using AspeQT and Altirra seems to be a better way to go to create disk copy images. I use an old laptop which can emulate up to 16 disk drives with AspeQT and can also run Altirra64. The serial converters for AspeQT are really cheap and I prefer to make my own adapters. I just made one with a CH340G serial converter which has a CTS pickup point like an FTDI serial converter. It seems to work fine but it's early days yet.

 

I am having similar problems to @SlagOMatic with Fujinet Web Config remote control of image selection such that I sometimes lose access to some or all Fujinet disks. I can't put my finger on the issue exactly but it seems to kick off when I change an image remotely.

 

I am using a selection of real Ataris too. A 600XL 64K, 800XLF 64K, 800XL 576K, 130XE and a special 320XE with HIAS hi-speed ROM and the TFHH EMMU with 74LS95 for ANTIC bank switching. At the moment I am using the 320XE for trying out the copier programs so have plenty of memory but not all the copiers will detect it all. I also have a selection of 1050 drives, most are modified to double density in some way.

 

I thought about using MyDOS 4.5, but came to the conclusion that as I used to use SpartaDOS regularly, and that SpartaDOS will read MyDOS disks, then SpartaDOS is probably the best DOS to use. At the moment, DISKCOPY seems to fit most requirements except for restricting the drive numbers from 1 to 4. DiskDup20 seems to need more parameters than I would necessarily know.

 

Edited April 5, 2023 by TZJB

[TZJB]

4 hours ago, Ely said:

I'm curious, is there a program that can detect what format a floppy is? I've got quite a few disks were I'm not sure what they are.

 

I think we have just covered that, try DISKCOPY from post 4 above. It can be run under most DOS.

[Ely]

59 minutes ago, TZJB said:

 

I think we have just covered that, try DISKCOPY from post 4 above. It can be run under most DOS.

Okay, but does it identify a disk as it copies it or does it show you want it is when the the disk is inserted?

[TZJB]

Just now, Ely said:

Okay, but does it identify a disk as it copies it or does it show you want it is when the the disk is inserted?

 

Using DISKCOPY the disk is identified when it is read. When you select the disk copy Source-Drive number and perform a Show Directory function, the program indicates the disk density together with the directory of DOS files.