Atari_Ace

In November of 1982, my family bought an 800 (around $650 IIRC) and later we bought a spare 800 when they were being closed out (closer to $100 I think). For the last 25 years they've been stored in our family home's basement, and just yesterday I was reunited with them after shipping them cross country. I hope to get them working again, as I know one of them was broken when I stored them, and the storage conditions were less than ideal so both need attention. This I think is the original 800, it has an embossed stamp of "ATARI 242" This one I think is the spare. No embossed stamp I can see.

Thanks for archiving these. "JACG Vol-029.atr" has a clearly damaged sector 485, which I restored using data from ACE Columbus disk 14b. The file SPLINE still doesn't look quite right, but at least it's a valid BASIC file now.JACG Vol-029.atr

https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/newsletters/abe_ace/abe_ace.html has a few 1985 issues I haven't seen elsewhere, plus many of the ones you just posted to archive.org.

Here's the listings that I validated against the checksums except for a handful of lines with inverse characters. Hopefully of some use. ls.txt

1985 side B sector 25 (in DOS.SYS) is mangled. I've patched in that sector from side A so that the disk now boots successfully. A_I_Antic_Index_1985_B_fix.atr

A few notes on the Misc Clippings that don't have issue identifiers: Ernie's Magic Shapes review - from PSAN May 1989, page 35 I, Ludicrous review - from PSAN May 1989, page 11 Phantasie II review - according to the January 1989 index, this was from PSAN May 1988, page 28 Understanding the Technology cartoon - from PSAN June 1989, page 17 - by Nick Berry

Gives the pinout as: 1. +36V 2. +36V 3. Ground 4. Reserved 5. Reserved 6. Audio 7. Ground 8. Audio 9. +36V 10. Ground 11. Ground 12. Reserved 13. Reserved 14. Ground 15. Ground

BTW, the 1989 and 1990 PSAN issues can be found at https://commodore.bombjack.org/atari-st/st-newsletters/puget-sound-atari-news/puget-sound-atari-news.htm. I count at least 26 articles over those issues by Penny Ormston.

Speaking of Z*Net (the newsletter insert), I'm wondering if more will turn up. On archive.org, you can find many of them inside various issues of the JACG (Jersey Atari Computer Group) newsletter. A couple of individual issues were also posted, including the first issue (1989-03), as well as 1990-03 (which I suspect just got separated from a JACG newsletter). You can fill in the gaps by going to Bombjack's Commodore archive and downloading the Puget Sound Atari News issues for 1989-1990, which include all the Z*Net's from 1989-06 to 1990-12. You can also find a few issues inside the Saint Paul ACE newsletter at http://space.atari.org/ (the June, July and September 1989 issues). The last issue I can find is Vol. III No. 5 May 1991, in the 1991-05 issue of JACG. The 1991-04 issue of JACG has the Vol. III No. 3 March 1991 Z*Net, so I'm not sure if Vol. III No. 4 was ever produced. Were there later Z*Net issues? There are no others in the available JACG issues from later 1991 (July, September, October, November), so it seems unlikely there could have been more than one or two more. So what we have is all of Volume 1 and 2, and issues 1, 2, 3 and 5 of Volume 3. Z*Net as a newsletter supplement was more focused on the ST, but there was a fair amount of 8-bit content.

Here are disks 1 and 7 with the links fixed up so the filesystem is at least consistent. Every file is damaged however, so don't consider these fixed in any significant way yet. As with disk 9, it's going to take a lot of work to restore these disks. NACC_1_fix1.atr NACC_7_fix1.atr

Yes, every track has multiple damaged sectors, making this one quite a puzzle to put back together. The directory appears damaged, hiding two files on the disk (BOWLING and AMODEM42), so I've readded those entries. I've also stitched the broken links back together so that the files can be extracted, but I believe every one of them is broken to some degree due to missing/damaged sectors. It will probably take quite some time to put it back together, but I'll take a crack at it eventually. NACC_9_fix1.atr

I fixed up the disk as best I could. DEFENSE and CONNECT4 have some lines I couldn't restore, so I REM'd them out for now. Hopefully the disk is at least a closer representation of what it was originally. NACC_2_fix2.atr

I haven't found a good match for CONNECT4 so I'm not sure of its origin, but the others I've found in other collections (or at least similar enough to be related). I've repaired about half of the broken programs and continue to work on fixing the remainder. Given SoftSide was published out of New Hampshire, I wonder if any of the Atari authors from that publication were associated with this user group? Prolific contributors to SoftSide of Atari content included David Bohlke, Alan J. Zett, and David Plotkin.

FYI, NACC_2.atr has lots of problems. Sector 472 was probably bad (it's empty in the image), and in sectors 30, 184, 380, 409, 419, 460, 499 and 509 the metadata appears to be incorrect. I've edited the metadata to make the files complete, but the files GOLDRUSH, SABOTAG, CONNECT4, DEFENSE, CHICKEN are damaged as a result. PINGPONG is also damaged. Only BLOCKADE, CONCEN, MULTIPLY, and OPART appear to have escaped damage and are valid BASIC programs. I suspect the files are common BASIC programs we can find in other collections and thus repair the damage, but I've only made minimal changes to the disk for the moment. I'll try to fix the disk more thoroughly later this week. NACC_2_fix1.atr

I've updated the "Applying the Atari" collection of columns at https://ksquiggle.neocities.org/columns/ata.htm to include the last three issues posted. Sometime I'll do the same for the "Note and Point" column.

I took a look. Sector 15 should be the last sector of the file MENU, but it links to sector 16 which is the next file AMAKER.APR. If you make sector 15 contain a single byte (0x16), MENU then becomes a valid BASIC program. The only other metadata issue appears to be that when a copy of INSIGHT.APR was deleted from sectors 23-34, the VTOC wasn't cleared, but that's a common issue on old disks. So here's the "fixed" atr. Compute_disk_1988_April_f1.atr

Thanks for these, I've updated the listings. As I expected, it was in code without checksums. Colon/semicolon and period/comma errors, I should have guessed.

Please send me any errors you spot. I validate the code against the "Program Perfect" codes if they are there, but that checksum is fairly weak, and not all the code has checksums. I generally start from the OCR's and clean them up. The OCRs of the listings are generally terrible, but the article text OCR are usually pretty good. I find the work relaxing, and don't mind the time spent doing them.

Cool, this archive has a set of Tyne & Wear (TWAUG) newsletter disks. All the copies of those newsletters I've found on the internet before seem to come from the same source and some of the disks are clearly damaged. For instance, issue 2 has severe 0x82 byte corruption and is essentially unusable. In the past I'd started the process of repairing the damage, but with hundreds of sectors to fix and no other source for some of the content, it was unlikely I'd ever be able to completely repair the disks. Imagine my delight when I noticed that OHAUG260A,B is that newsletter, and it doesn't have 0x82 byte corruptions. In fact, using "cmp -l" I can verify the only differences in the files are the byte 0x82 corruptions. The other two disks in the TWAUG collection I know have problems are 16B and 19A, and the OHAUG copies of those are identical to the ones previously archived, so no help there.

Perhaps we can recover some of the bad sectors with a different drive, but probably not, and unless the disk contents are unusual it's probably not worth the effort. I updated my disk parser to look for and do some basic analysis of PrintShop disks (there were quite a few in this collection) and I found at least a couple that have issues. OHAUG323A.atr: Sector 371 should be a directory sector, but it seems to be another random sector. I reconstructed the 4 directory entries with placeholder names for now. OHAUG591A.atr: The last couple of directory sectors (392, 393) look corrupted. The end of the sectors look like DOS files. Since the data is mostly zeros, most of these entries should be ignored by PrintShop, but I just had to zero one additional byte to make the directory consistent. I don't see any PrintShop files after the last valid entry, so I don't think anything was lost, but I should look more closely at this disk later. The issues I'm seeing are common in all user group disk archives. The fast hardware disk copiers had a bug that wrote 0x82 to the 3rd byte in a sector if some sequence of operations was done, and disks formats fade with time. I'll post my fixed disks and my notes after I've had more time to examine the disks.

Awesome! More disks than Bellcom, this is going to be a treasure trove. I made a first pass through the files looking for metadata corruption or other errors to look into later (repairing disk collections is an occasional hobby of mine): At least 40 disks have byte 0x82 at sector offset 0x02 corruption in the DOS directories/vtoc, which are usually repairable. There are some disks though that are full of those errors and will likely be hard to fix (e.g. OHAUG238A.atr, OHAUG491A.atr, OHAUG596B.atr, OHAUG615B.atr have >100 sectors damaged). Another 35+ disks have empty sectors inside files, which will require tracking down another source for the files. An example is OHAUG015A.atr, which is blank starting at sector 599, even though the disk looks like it should be nearly full. The zeroed files are common ANALOG games, so easy to replace in this case. 8 disks have duplicates in the collection. Half of these are side A and B are the same (OHAUG058A,B; OHAUG585A,B; OHAUG685A,B; OHAUG686A,B), so they might have been archived incorrectly. I only spotted one truncated disk, OHAUG563B.atr should have been a 130K disk. It was probably duplicated incorrectly, I've seen this error in other user group archives occasionally. This collection is going to keep me busy for awhile. Hopefully it will help restore files in other user group archives.

From the Bellcom 1992 catalog (on archive.org): ■ D-83 PEDROKKO #6 Side 1 contains additional voice excerpts from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, while side 2 contains larger “scenes” created using Turtles sound track samples. (Side 2 requires 130XE and player from #D-78) If you just want to browse what's in the Bellcom collection, start with the catalogs.

The Games in Basic disks appear to be compressed binary blobs with no structure (zipping the atrs strongly hints that they've already been compressed). Now I'm curious what created those disks.

There may not have been a July 1991 issue. The June 1991 issue I bought at a bookstore had a little circular "July 1991" sticker over the date on the cover (which fell off at some point, but I can still see the discoloration over the date).

Thanks Farb, very much appreciated. Here are three additional dat files that aren't in that collection. a8preservation-extra.zip