Apple II & Atari 8-Bit image files.

[Pheonix]

I'm in the process of dumping my disks. With the C64 & Amiga disks, there doesn't seem to be a problem. But many of my C64 disks also have Apple II & Atari 8-Bit version (on the back, as a dual format, etc...) The problem I'm having is that absolutely none of my disks for either Apple II or Atari will function in the emulator. Since none of them work, I can only assume that this has to do with copy protection.

So, even if its just for testing purposes, is there a converter anywhere to build images that support copy protection? My Atari emulator supports Vapi files (which I'm told supports copy protectin,) but I cannot find a converter. The XFD converter built into DTC doesn't work with any of my disks. Even the ones that are supposed to be unprotected. The only format I know of for Apple II that supports copy protection is the NIB format (which I know isn't complete,) but it would at least get me by for now (hopefully.)

On the chance that I'm just doing it wrong, instructions on how to do it right would also be appreciated.

Thank you

[spags]

Presumably the actual dump from Kryoflux on the Apple // disks is reporting fine. I'm sort of going from memory here and haven't checked any of these details so treat them accordingly. One thing that might be a problem is the disk sector interleaving. I have seen some Apple // emulators treat the different DOS/ProDOS interleaving based on the image filename extension. I think .DSK is meant to be DOS interleaving and .PO for ProDOS interleaving. It might be worthwhile just trying to rename your images from one to the other and seeing if you get a different result.

[Pheonix]

I tried renaming to .PO, but now it doesn't even show the ProDos 1.1.1 screen. It just sits there at a black screen. Remembering how slow old floppies were, I waited 20 minutes and it didn't do anything. With the .DSK extention, I get the ProDos 1.1.1 screen, but again, it never does anything after that.

[mr.vince]

Correct interleaving of side/track?

[spags]

Stick with your DSK extension then. It probably means that you have dumped it with the wrong interleave (I've done that many times before). Your emulator is sane enough to treat it accordingly with the extension trick.

Ok it's ProDOS. Assuming it is stock standard Apple ProDOS, from memory the floppy required two files to even be bootable. I think they were something like PRODOS.SYS and BASIC.SYS and optionally a STARTUP file. I don't recall what would happen if BASIC.SYS was missing, but it could well have done nothing and presented a blank screen.

If it is not standard ProDOS, then it will still have PRODOS.SYS, but will also have one or more other *.SYS files. As far as I recall, ProDOS was designed to be a very customisable system however I don't recall copy protection being that popular on it.

If I were you, I'd boot into another ProDOS disk and see if there are any meaningful files on the disk. A good choice would be the Apple ProDOS Utilities disk (if that is what it is really called - stretching my memory). You will probably find a copy of it in the Asimov FTP site (if it still exists) under the Disk or Utilities directory.

Boot into the utility and it should take you to a command prompt. If not, reboot and hold down Control-C (this breaks out of any STARTUP file).

Once at the prompt, eject the booted floppy and insert your dumped floppy and type "CATALOG,D1" without the quotes. This will display the directory listing. If there is a lot of content, you can use "CAT,D1" instead. If you get a nice alphanumeric directory listing without any (funny or special characters) and the file dates look normal and reasonable then that is a good start.

If there are way too many files to display on the screen at once, you can press Control-S immediately after issuing the catalog command to pause and resume the listing, but this will only work if you are emulating at genuine Apple // speeds (which is probably the default in your emulator, but may not be).

If you see a *.SYS file other than PRODOS.SYS or BASIC.SYS, then type "PREFIX,D1". Then (assuming your *.SYS file is called SAMPLE.SYS) try typing "-SAMPLE.SYS". This should attempt to launch that system file. It may or may not work - I can't remember if *.SYS files could be any standard BINary file or if they were only ever used for booting purposes.

If you see a STARTUP file then you are indeed lucky because it probably really is stock ProDOS. In this case type "PREFIX,D1" followed by "-STARTUP" and that should get you going.

Report back with what filenames you see in the catalog, or on any other oddities or problems.

[Pheonix]

Manually loading the u1.system sys file just throws up the debug monitor. Even when the window wasn't active, PrntScrn wouldn't capture a screenshot, so I pulled up the disk listing in CiderPress (below). The cat,d1 command pulls up the same list. I'm fairly sure that there is either something wrong with the disk, or the on-disk copy protection is the problem.

[spags]

Hmm, it might be some sort of copy protection then, or otherwise one of the starting files may be corrupt.

From CiderPress, I think you can right-click on the files and get options to view the contents. SYS and BIN may have options to view the assembly code. Your BIN files at AUX address $4000 might be graphics files although the file size doesn't look familiar. CiderPress may allow you to view them in the right-click menu.

The U1.SYSTEM is somewhat small and it may be possible to view the assembly code and trace out what it is doing but it takes some patience. If you view it as Text in CiderPress, you may be able to spot a filename of what it calls next (my guess would be U1.INTRO). You could then try launching that file and hope for the best but it is unlikely to work.

I'll email you shortly to figure out options.

[Pheonix]

Well, I got all my Atari disks working now I had to use a 3rd party program to convert RAW stream files to ATR/ATX format. Actually, the ATR format failed as well, but the ATX format worked just fine. And actually, the "Gateway to Apshai" disk worked just fine with XFD format. After I updated my extremely old (it turns out,) Atari emulator to one that supported XFD files and not just ATR. Though my old one would convert XFD to ATR, and that might have worked just fine - never tried it. The updated version works with either now So no worries where that's concerned.

FYI, the file I found was A8RAWCONV, and I had to get v0.7 so that it could "reverse" the RAW file when converting. Almost all my Atari disks were on the flip side of the disk. Though 1 or 2 had a second index hole.

As for my Apple II disks, I'm steal searching & researching. The games that fail are all copy protected disks. Actually, the only games I have are copy protected. The DSK format does not support on disk copy protection (according to everything I can find.) From what I'm reading the PO & DO formats also do not support copy protection. The only one I can find that does is the NIB format. Useless for archival purposes, but I just want to test (and play since I no longer have a physical Apple II machine,) my games.

So, has anyone written a converter from Kryoflux RAW stream to NIB format Apple II disk image format? I've been searching, but can't find anything Expanding my search to include 2MG files as well, as they can also incorporate NIB format (info says they are a DSK or NIB image with extra data.)

[Pheonix]

I've done some more research, but still can't seem to find a converter of any sort. There are 3 formats (maybe 4,) that may support some copy protected games. These are:

•Universal Disk Images (.2mg, .2img)
•Unadorned nibble-format files (.nib, .nb2)
•Raw FDI images of 5.25" and 3.5 disks (read-only) (.fdi)
•Copy II Plus (.img)

I cut and pasted those from the CiderPress information page. The FDI image would have to be converted by CiderPress before use, though. I had thought that someone had made a converter for RAW stream files to FDI, but cannot find it That would have allowed me to maybe test the 2 protected games. The Copy II Plus IMG format may or may not support copy protected games, I haven't been able to find confirmation one way or another. I do know that Copy II PC (one of the later versions I think,) used the Option Board (also Deluxe Option Board,) for reading and copying protected disks on the PC. The information I read on it says it also copied 1/4 & 1/2 tracks, so it looks promising.

[Cosmo]

This is very interesting. I am also struglin with the Apple ][ disks how to get them imaged/preserved correctly and run on emulators.
Convertor would be great to have.