Extracting images of Atari 800 diskettes.

From: Scott Stevens <chenmel_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Sat Feb 19 13:14:20 2005

A few months ago I picked up a complete Atari 800 system at a local
estate auction. It included the disk drive and three boxes (aprox. 300
diskettes) of software for the Atari 800.

I listed it all as a complete system on eBay. A few days later, after
the bidding frenzy had fired up, I was notified by eBay that somebody
had complained and the auction was delisted by eBay because it included
the floppy diskettes. There are a LOT of programs on said disks, from
the early to mid 1980's. It looks like the collection of an avid BBSer.
 

Anyway, I relisted the system, minus all diskettes which weren't
'original' diskettes with a publisher's label on them. The system ended
up selling for about the price that the system plus disks had bid up to
in two days (I suspect many people were more interested in the software
than the machine).

Now I have the aprox. 280 diskettes left. I can't sell them on eBay to
a collector, and have been thinking it would be neat to extract the
software off the diskettes and find an Atari 800 simulator to run some
of the programs.

Is there an easy means to extract the software off these diskettes? I
sold the Atari disk drive (these are 5-1/4" diskettes) with the system.
Is there a utility to read these on another platform?

I'd like to extract the data/software rather than just 'wipe the disks
out.' I do have uses for the diskettes themselves, but it seems just
wrong to delete what might be the last remaining copies of some of this
software.

-Scott
Received on Sat Feb 19 2005 - 13:14:20 GMT

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