Farb

This will ultimately be a matter of opinion and perspective. Keep in mind that I am not the creator or maintainer of the S-Drive Max project and am not speaking for the project itself. I am merely someone who has contributed a significant amount of effort to improving it. I agree these sellers are providing a helpful paid service to the subset of the community that can't or won't assemble the device themselves. I don't fault them for wanting to make some money doing it. But that is not, in my opinion, contributing back to the project. I would hope that those who monetize any open-source project contribute something back to that project directly. These contributions can take many forms depending on the skills of the people involved: code/hardware design contributions, knowledge sharing, community support, monetary donations, etc. Red Hat has created a very profitable business with this approach -- they create paid products using various open source projects. The thing that keeps them from simply being a company profiting off the hard work of others is that they funnel some of those profits to pay teams of developers that contribute improvements and bug fixes back to those open source projects. What is unacceptable to me, however, is people selling SDM devices with enhancements and refusing to contribute back those enhancements (or creating barriers to open sharing) to retain some sort of competitive advantage. That is simply a slap in the face to those who gave their project contributions away for free and is exactly the type of thing that many open source licenses try to prevent. Anyway, I've said my peace and won't belabor this point any further.

So we've got one person who has already sold 185 S-Drive Max units in a nice custom case that won't share the design yet (maybe in a couple of months). Another has made useful alterations to a community case design and won't share them. And still others are selling what sounds like hundreds of S-Drive Max's at $75-$100 per unit -- are they contributing anything back? Everything they are doing is built on the hard work of members of the Atari community that have chosen to give their contributions away for free. Hearing things like this makes it very difficult to continue to put work into this project ☹️

Sounds good. I'm hoping he'll contribute back to the community given what he is selling.

Sorry, just realized my comment seemed like it was directed at you -- it definitely was not. I just wanted to make sure _The Doctor_'s comment wasn't misinterpreted by anyone to mean we weren't interested in backup copies of originals. However you want to contribute what you dump is fine. We can do any necessary filtering on our side ?

Agreed that the XE-style case is nice! Is there a 3D model for it available?

Thanks for taking the time to dump these, @Zarxx Just to make sure it's clear, we are still interested in copies if they retain the original copy protection. They can be helpful for verification purposes especially when we have originals that have corrupted data.

Thanks, @Zarxx. That allowed us to verify Phantom ?

Thanks for all your hard work archiving these disks, @rcamp48! And thanks for posting Diskkeeper @Timothy Kline.

Be careful, it looks like Adventure International had a trademark on that term as early as 1980 https://archive.org/details/1980-07-compute-magazine/page/n32

I'm going to guess Ohio is closer to you than Frankfurt but I'm happy to dump them if you send them my way :-) I would recommend sending them to someone with a Kryoflux, though. There is a much better chance of getting all the data off the disks even though they are not copy protected.

Yes, you can dump them that way as well. Doing so will require running the disk through the drive twice (once for each side). A Kryoflux setup like toddtmw and myself have can do it in one pass. Additionally, the Kryoflux will read each track 5 times so there's a better chance of recovering data from parts of the disks that may be starting to go bad. If you do go down the route of dumping them yourself, be sure to check the drive head periodically for dirt and clean it if needed. One dirty disk dump can prevent subsequent disks from dumping correctly.

I wasn't necessarily suggesting that Epyx themselves renamed them -- otherwise we'd have games that match that description published by Epyx. However, if they were contracted out to another company for development, it's possible they might have been released by a different publisher at some point in the future if Epyx had dropped them.

It should be. I have occasionally seen the problem you are describing and don't yet know why it is happening. A browser reload usually clears it right up.

There were a few Epyx titles that were announced at 1982 C.E.S. but I have never seen released: Far Protector Fishes Qwerty Bird Soldiers of Sorcery Does anyone know what happened to these games? Do the descriptions sound familiar to anyone as games that might have been released later under a different name?

Just out of curiosity, is there a reason you chose to use later or European box covers for titles originally released in the U.S. using different artwork (e.g. Eidolon, Jumpman, Zaxxon, Beta Lyrae, Beach-Head, Spy vs. Spy: Island Caper, Rescue on Fractalus, etc.)?

The progress on this has been fantastic! Is anyone in Europe able to print a case and willing to sell it? :-) Sent from my ONEPLUS A6003 using Tapatalk

The database that backs the a8preservation.com website is being actively kept up to date. So it should reflect the current state of things minus a few of the more recent contributions that haven't been processed yet.

Thanks for dumping this title, Allan!

Does anyone know anything about this title: https://www.ebay.com/itm/The-XE-Telephone-Book-Original-disk-Atari-400-800-XL-XE-XEGS-computers/254203205390?hash=item3b2fb1170e:g:vY0AAOSwTIFct5J0 Give the author (Jan Iverson), I wonder if it was an EZuse Software, XLEnt Software or just a PD/Shareware title.

Just please respect the open source licenses of those projects. The code is not "free as in beer" :-)

Hi all, As a learning exercise, I've been looking at the flux values stored in SuperCard Pro files and it raised some questions about how this data is interpreted. I'm hoping someone here can help answer them. Here is a quick diagram: My understanding based on looking through websites and PDFs on the Internet is that 8-bit SD disks use FM encoding which means flux transitions are interpreted as I've tried to show in the diagram. The values in the SCP file indicate the duration of each flux transition. I'm converting those values into microseconds using: num * 25 * (driveRpm / 288.0) / 1000.0 I assume here that I need to account for the fact that my drive captured the data at 360 rpm but the data is intended to be read at 288 rpm. 1. I'm unclear what is considered a "bit cell". I had thought that the term referred to the 8 microsecond interval as shown in the diagram during which no transition means a 0 and a single transition means a 1. However, the SCP format documentation seems to indicate "bit cell" and "flux transition" are synonymous. 2. I can't seem to find any information on how to determine byte demarcations in the stream of bits. 3. In the flux output of a track with no copy protection, I see some transitions that are higher than the ~4 or ~8 us that I would expect (e.g. 11 us). What does that represent? Perhaps related to question #2? I have looked at the a8rawconv source code to see how the FM decoding is done but it is not entirely clear why the code is doing what it is doing :-) Thanks for any insight anyone can share.

Yes, the a8preservation.com website records all titles we have dumps for. Just look up the title, find the release (based on publisher, date and country) and then look to see if there are dumps flagged as "preserved" for that release. If there are, no need to risk dumping it. I hope you can get your drive working again!

I've finished the remaining dumps that have been uploaded so far: The Factory - disk has a lot of corruption. The parts that were readable matched with a dump contributed by ClayCowgill. MicroSailing - had some bad sector reads that appeared to be compensated for by the 4 other reads of the same sector that were present in the Kryoflux dump. This version doesn't require BASIC and we have no other dumps to compare it to yet. Paint - Identical to two other Paint dumps that we have. Action Adventures - had some read errors but the areas that were good were identical to the Atarimania dump. We will need one more good, original dump to consider this release preserved. Arcade II - Differs from Atarimania dump by one byte in empty area of the disk. Video Math Flashcards - Identical to Atarimania dump so we can consider this title preserved. My First Alphabet - Identical to two other dumps of this title that we have. Thanks again for taking the time to do these and look forward to seeing the rest!

I've started processing your uploads. So far: Keyboard Organ is identical to our existing dump except yours is missing sector 14 so might be a bad disk. Space Shuttle is identical to our verified dump. Freaky Factory appears to be blank?

Thanks for reporting the metrics. While it is interesting, I tend to view the level of contribution and participation as the gauge of reach/popularity rather than the number of downloads Without contributions, the project will die (or at least reach a state where no one cares about it anymore). On that note, we have been seeing an uptick in contributions in the past couple of months so it's quite positive!