Universal drive

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Mon Oct 5 10:28:32 1998

At 09:03 AM 10/4/98 -0400, Doug Spence wrote:
>There was a commercial product called either DOS-2-DOS or DISK-2-DISK (I
>forget which) which was able to access 1541 disks on a filesystem level,
>for reading AND writing.

That company was Central Coast Software, run by George Chamberlin.
He sold out to New Horizons, another pioneer Amiga company. Eventually
NH's assets (including all the source code) were auctioned off and
went at a discount price to a Canajun company whose name included
the word "wonder", and I don't know what happened to it after that.
I bid in the auction and missed it by a few hundred bucks. I wanted to
take all their products, source and docs, and sell them on a CD as is.

I have Dos-2-Dos (for DOS disks) and Disk-2-Disk (for C64 disks) in my
archives, along with the adapter cables to connect your 1541 or Amiga
5 1/4 drive. I've used the freeware copier, too, with the motor-speed
tweak to read 1541 disks on the Amiga, as well as the parallel-port
to 1541 DIN version for the PC.

However, I'd really like to find someone with knowledge of cracking
old C-64 protection schemes. My friends and I made a few games with
protection schemes, and we can't remember what we did, and so we
have no way to run our old games in an emulator. :-)

>BTW, there's an excellent article by Betty Clay entitled "Amiga Disk
>Encoding Schemes" in Volume 3, Issue 1 of Amiga Transactor magazine. That
>article, plus the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual and RKM: Libraries &
>Devices were my starting points for the project.

You can reach Betty at <76702.337_at_compuserve.com>. She's quite a
character, one of the sysops of the Amiga area on Compuserve. She's
an ex-schoolteacher from Texas. Knew Amiga assembler better than I did.

I'm intrigued by the ideas for dirt-simple bit-streaming digitizing
hardware for rescuing old floppy data. Digitizing the strength of the
signal on the disk would go a long way to rescue old data, I think,
breaking the reliance on the old intermediate hardware to turn it
into a recognizable bitstream. I recall that one of our list members
does this sort of trick with old reel tapes: digitize the channels,
reconstruct at leisure using today's cheap hard disk space and CPU time.

- John
Received on Mon Oct 05 1998 - 10:28:32 BST