Magic Knight Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 I'm currently using Disk copy 2000 to write to floppies.(Yeah great name ;0) This is usually via SIO2PC. Although it works great, there seems to be absolutely loads of different copiers out there. Is there a definitive one for ATR's folk can recommend? (not minding of they are cracked etc). Why so many? And what's the best for ATR's? Thanks in advance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JR> Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 I always liked the one built in to SmartDOS back in the day. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dimfil Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 (edited) I don't know why there are so many, I don't know which one is the best... But I used Sector Copier 810 and MyCopyr! 2.1 after other users recommendations and both worked with sio2pc and 1050 combo. Edited March 5, 2019 by dimfil Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manterola Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 I have always used UScopier since it can skip and/or retry bad sectors, and it uses extended RAM. But i am sure there are better ones. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bfollowell Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 I don't know about using it for ATRs but back in the day I always swore by Disk Wizard II. It's what I used to copy pretty much everything I have today. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RodLightning Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 Disk Wizard II was/is my favorite. It has a hex editor and allows you to look at a disk, sector by sector....maybe a little more than you need, but one of the best disk tools available. The C.A.P. Software version is here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/174204-disk-wizard-iidiskwizii/ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 Well, it more or less depends on a) what sizes you want to copy with a sectorcopy program and b) if you use a real floppy drive with/without speeder or c) an emulated floppy drive (SIO2xyz) or d) a harddisk (or emulated harddisk) or maybe e) some type of flashcart or maybe some other media drive (I do not think of atm)... - a sector copier 810 might be good for a 90k diskette, but will not copy any other size... - a 1050 copy program may work with 90k and 130k, but no bigger formats and maybe no speeders... - an ultraspeed copy program may work with 90k, 130k and 180k (and sometimes also with 360k), but rarely with higher formats up to 16MB; and often the copy program is limited to a certain ultraspeed floppy speeder (e.g. only Happy, only USD, only Speedy, etc. Try e.g. Copy 2000 on a Happy, it will not work! It refuses to format and refuses to write, since it is meant for Speedy drives only) and on drives without ultraspeed these programs work quite slow (in standard 1x SIO speed)... - there are sector copiers that support several speeders and even using two different speeders at the same time (e.g. Diskcopy from TurboDOS XE supports Happy, Speedy, Turbo 1050 and XF551; one can use two different drives/speeders as source and destination and both drives will read/write in highest possible speed), but again they are limited regarding disk size (ATR size) and none of them supports up to 16MB (e.g. Diskcopy is limited to 360k); and as soon as one uses a SIO2xyz device and wants to use Pokey divisor one or zero, he will find out, that many of these "speeder" sector copy programs are also limited to a certain max. speed they support (max. Pokey divisor 5 or 6 for Happy, Speedy, USD and various other speeders) and will not work at all with a higher speed (a lower Pokey divisor) - so quite often with SIO2xyz devices it is best to use a DOS, Gamedos and Sectorcopy program that has no built-in speeder at all and then use Hias Hi-OS to still use Pokey divisor zero with them... (e.g. Diskcopy will work with Pokey divisor 5 or 6, but not with 4, 3, 2,1,0; Copy 2000 to my surprise works with divisor zero, allthough it is an ultraspeed program, most other ultraspeed, turbospeed, highspeed and whatnot-speed programs fail with Pokey divisor zero); The list with pros and cons about any sectorcopier can go on endlessly; think it is best nowadays to have a sectorcopy program that allows copying any format, any density up to 16MB or even 32MB, so any format from 90k up to 16MB or 32MB can be duplicated - but only, if you do own any A8 drives or media that support up to 16MB or 32MB; there exist several of these programs, one of them is HDSC by KMK, think Abbuc floppydoc (E.Puetz) and CAS (C.Strotmann) also wrote some copy programs that can copy up to 16MB, provided one has at least two media drives (floppy, SIO2xyz, harddisk, flash, etc.) and a minimum of 48k or 64k RAM; Afaik, none of these "up to 16MB" copy programs supports a floppy speeder, so using them on a 1050 with speeder might be quite slow and there are various floppy speeders that do have a sector copy program built-in and one simply needs to boot the drive without a floppy to load them, which will be much faster than loading such a 16MB copy program from diskette and then copying a 90k/130k/180k with 1x SIO. But if you have a SIO2xyz device or a harddisk, these copy programs for large formats might be quite handy... so, as said before, it depends on what kind of drive you have and what format(s) you want to copy. One or two years ago, I collected some sector copy programs and sorted them into formats they could max. copy and since all of them can copy 90k, I started with 130k, then 180k, 360k and 720k and stopped there, since 720k was/is the max. my real (3,5") A8 floppy drives can use. Afaik, there does not exist any sector copy program (or none that I know of) that can copy 1440k, the next bigger step beyond 720k seem to be the sector copy programs that can copy 90k up to 16MB (and one of them most likely also up to 32MB)... but I rarely use any formats bigger than 720k, so the programs for up to 16MB (32MB) which I have are quite old and outdated (there have been updates of them, which I did not download from the internet or did not copy from the magazine they were published into the folder with copy programs)... Note: Use all attached sector copy programs with caution and do not accidentally destroy your disks or images with valuable data; some of these programs may not work with your hardware (lock up/crash) or behave strangely (don't like your computer/OS, floppy/speeder, etc.) or produce unwanted effects... use them at your own risk! As said before, the 16MB copy programs are not the newest/latest versions, there have been one or more updates to KMK's HDSC program, as well as Abbuc floppydoc's sectorcopy program, which I have not downloaded nor copied to this ATR image yet... so maybe errors occur or things do not work as they should... again, use them at your own risk! Copy_upto_16MB.zip Sector_COPY_pgms.zip 7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magic Knight Posted March 5, 2019 Author Share Posted March 5, 2019 (edited) Wow Thanks for the suggestions (and Chaplin for the amazing info). Currently I'm using a stock 1050. But the above is invaluable. Edited March 5, 2019 by Magic Knight 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Nezgar Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 I've been a fan of MyCopyR mostly in the past due to it's ultraspeed and enhanced density support. I've recently been playing with CopyMate 4.4, which unfortunately also doesn't support Enhanced Density disks (Single and Double density only), but it supports ultraspeed protocol. It will automatically try reading with 3 different skews, allowing a US Doubler (which has no track buffer) to even read disks with regular skew at full speed, which is pretty cool. Also, I'm curious to check the behaviour of other mods and copy programs, but with CopyMate and a US doubler, bad sectors are tried 3 times without a stepper seek back to track 0, minimizing wear & tear time on the disk surface if marginal disks are being read. SCOPY is a nice command line sector copier that can be used from SpartaDOS to copy from drive to drive, or drive to/from a file. Although I've had issues with it as well on enhanced density disks. It will read regular skew disks at ultraspeed with a US doubler as well. I haven't tried Disk Wizard II yet, but this software supposedly will at least copy the corrupted data it WAS able to read from a bad sector, instead of leaving the entire sector blank in the resulting copy. I suspect combining it with an OS that provides ultraspeed and a buffered speeder like Happy or Speedy would make it quite fast as well. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SS Posted March 5, 2019 Share Posted March 5, 2019 I like "Disk Magic XL", "Disk Wizard II", and "Diskey". I have only very recently discovered "Chipmunk" but haven't had much opportunity to really use it yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FULS Posted March 6, 2019 Share Posted March 6, 2019 My favorite is "Copymate Xe V3.7 (1997-11-03)(Kay, Jason)". "Single, Double and Enhanced (1050) Densities are all supported.COPYMATE is Density Smart, it will determine the correct density of the source disk when you insert it and press START ." You can skip errors or retry up-to 7 times per sector. Copymate Xe V3.7 (1997-11-03)(Kay, Jason)128k.atr 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted March 6, 2019 Share Posted March 6, 2019 My favorite is "Copymate Xe V3.7 (1997-11-03)(Kay, Jason)". "Single, Double and Enhanced (1050) Densities are all supported. COPYMATE is Density Smart, it will determine the correct density of the source disk when you insert it and press START ." You can skip errors or retry up-to 7 times per sector. Copymate Xe V3.7 (1997-11-03)(Kay, Jason)128k.atr In my collection of sector copy programs above, you will find a somewhat newer version of the same Copymate, version 3.8 from 03/27/87. Looks to be the same, also requires 128k memory to run, has the same author, but is a newer version from a few days later... (yes, both versions 3.7 and 3.8 are from 1987, not 1997)... do not know what was fixed or updated there... Allthough it can read+write up to 720k disks/images (DS/DD/80T), it does NOT support any floppy speeder it seems and a max. of 320k memory. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magic Knight Posted March 6, 2019 Author Share Posted March 6, 2019 Thanks for the guidance. Looking forward to a busy weekend trying these out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Nezgar Posted March 6, 2019 Share Posted March 6, 2019 Huh.. Well, so this 3.7/3.8 version of copymate is more capable than 4.4? (re: ED support) I'll have to check this out. EDIT: just had a look at them... First of all, turns out I was using 4.3, not 4.4... But 4.4 looks almost identical, except someone may have replaced the authors names with ATASCII line characters, and some other minor cosmetic differences that could have been done with a sector editor... 4.4 still does not support ED properly. (Only reads first 720 sectors, and writes a SD destination disk) Copymate "XE" is an entirely different program, which seems to more closely resemble MyCopyR. Maybe just a 'fork' from an earlier version of CopyMate... ED Support continues reading everything in the first pass, and the lines start scrolling, unlike MyCopyR which still does it in 2 passes. It also does not do the creative out-of-order sector read/write to for US Doubler maximum speed on standard skew disks... It supports US Doubler/Happy ultraspeed (divisor 10) but not higher, so maybe CharlieChaplin's assumption that Copymate XE does not work with Speeders is because Speedy which uses divisor 9 will be unrecognized, and it will drop to 1x SIO. MyCopyR 2.1, and CopyMate 4.3/4.4 DO support higher divisors - ie I'm using divisor 3 on RespeQt as drive 2 with no issues. Also, annoyingly, it doesn't have format destination ON by default... Comparing the screenshots, it looks like just the description for the "R"etry command was added to the first screen, and the retry times text/brackets changed slightly in the menu.. Oh boy, now i see another half dozen more versions/variations of CopyMate XE / 576K, etc on CharlieChaplin's Sector_COPY_pgms.zip ..... --- COPYMATE XE BY MIKE PALMER XE MODS BY MIKE LONG --- COPYMATE XE by Mike Palmer XE MODS by Mike Long & Peter Nicholls --- Super Copymate XE 576K 130XE VERSION by Richard E. Morris original by Mike Palmer --- 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted March 6, 2019 Share Posted March 6, 2019 (edited) Cool, maybe some other Atarians can do some tests as well with their drives (or drive speeders) and the various copy programs and report how they work or behave. I only have Speedy 1050 and Hyper-XF drives (5,25" and 3,5") and with Copymate 3.8 none of them works with ultraspeed. Okay, Speedy does Speedy ultraspeed and with Turbo 1050 Emulator loaded it does turbospeed; Hyper-XF also does ultraspeed, it reacts on many Happy programs / speeders (but not all) and some USD programs / speeders (but not all). So I falsely assumed that Copymate 3.7/3.8 does not support speeders at all. I even made some tests with various DOS versions (with built-in speeder) and when this did not work with ultraspeed, I also appended Copymate 3.8 to the ultraspeed driver by Bob Woolley (which works very good with Speedy and Hyper-XF), but still Copymate jumped back to 1x SIO speed. Maybe someone can make a small fix, so that Copymate 3.8 also works with Speedy and Hyper-XF ultraspeed ?!? Furthermore, I wrote above that none of the up to 16MB copy programs do support any speeders which is wrong or better use of a wrong word - none of them do *contain* any speeders. But if you use a DOS or OS which has built-in support for a speeder, then these copy programs will also support this speeder... Finally, if you own some other cool sectorcopy program and its not in the collection above, it would be nice if you upload it or give a download link... Edited March 6, 2019 by CharlieChaplin 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted March 6, 2019 Share Posted March 6, 2019 DO any of them handle 8 inch drives in 1.2 m give or take? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted March 6, 2019 Share Posted March 6, 2019 (edited) DO any of them handle 8 inch drives in 1.2 m give or take? Hmmm, short answer: I do not know! (Never had an 8 inch drive.) Long answer: If you like adventures and/or risk something... On the ATR image COPY720k.ATR there is a program named DUPCOP.COM (Disk Duplication 2.0), it supports 40 tracks, 80 tracks and 77 tracks in single, enhanced or double density. It most likely does not use/support the full 1.2m though... but one can e.g. load it from MyDOS with ultraspeed driver by Bob Wolley and ramdisk driver by Lee Barnes installed - then it also supports ultraspeed and ramdisks/XRAM up to 1MB (set ramdisk to "on" in the copy program then, it will reserve approx. 100 sectors for DUP.SYS and use all the rest as XRAM and copy buffer)... The copy programs that can copy up to 16MB could theoretically support these drives. Let's assume you have already formatted such an 8" disk and filled it completely with data (e.g. with Sparta/MyDOS and/or a filecopy program) and want to make copies of it. Format another 8" disk with Sparta or MyDOS (or some of their utilities), then use the 90k-16MB copy program to copy the already filled disk. When the copy program has loaded, simply set the start and end sector (1, XXXXX unsure how many sectors such a disk has) and the density (128B or 256B or maybe 512B) and then you can theoretically start to copy / duplicate the data... but again, unsure if this will work, since I never had any 8" disks... Are they DD or HD ? 128, 256 or 512 Bytes ? 35, 40, 77 or 80 tracks ? Simply try it yourself and report what happens when using some of the sector copy programs with your 8" drive... but do not blame me when some of your disks or the drive get/s killed. That's your own risk! Edited March 6, 2019 by CharlieChaplin 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magic Knight Posted March 6, 2019 Author Share Posted March 6, 2019 I see some out there are 4k in size which Is excellent (xex or Atr) and some are larger for extended memories. Is there a rom version of any that fits on Ultimate 1mb? (In one of the cart or basic slots?) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mathy Posted March 6, 2019 Share Posted March 6, 2019 Hello guys "ultraspeed driver by Bob Woolley"??? Me want! Sincerely Mathy 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted March 7, 2019 Share Posted March 7, 2019 (edited) Ermmm. I already uploaded these ultraspeed drivers several times here (usually on a MyDOS disk). They use RAM under the OS and therefore will only work on XL/XE computers (or 400/800 with Incognito); the drivers are NOT Reset-proof (Reset will disable it), programs that alter location $D301 will also disable them (that's why you have to load e.g. Ramdisk driver first in MyDOS and then the ultraspeed driver)... and many programs simply do not work with them or lock up... There are two versions of this ultraspeed driver, a) one for file programs (it can be used as Autorun.SYS or appended to a file program) or DOS versions that normally don't have ultraspeed available and b) another one for boot diskettes. The driver for file programs works instantly (if not, you had bad luck), while the driver for boot disks simply seems to hang after loading - this is intentionally, so one can swap disks (insert a bootdisk) and when done, press Start to try booting with ultraspeed. Think Bob Woolley is the author of these ultraspeed drivers and he also wrote a similar driver for XF highspeed (if it was someone else, sorry!). But afaik, there is only one version of the XF highspeed driver for file programs (and no version for boot disks)... SPDSIO1.xex SPDSIO1.txt SPDSIO2.xex SPDSIO2.txt XFHIGH.xex XFHIGH.TXT Edited March 7, 2019 by CharlieChaplin 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted March 7, 2019 Share Posted March 7, 2019 Hmmm, @ The Doctor: Does your 8" and 1.2m drive support the Percom standard (afair, 12 config. Bytes) ?!? If so, there is a program named Percom.COM which maybe, maybe supports it and allows formatting it... and since the program only formats, but does not write a DIR, you can try to use FMTDIR by Bob Puff to write a MyDOS or SpartaDOS compatible DIR. Unsure if any of these tools work with your drive, but maybe worth a try... attached an older MyDOS version (4.55 beta 3) with Percom.COM and FMTDIR. MYDOSUS.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
8bit-Dude Posted May 23, 2021 Share Posted May 23, 2021 On 3/6/2019 at 6:08 AM, CharlieChaplin said: Copy_upto_16MB.zip 39.47 kB · 104 downloads Sector_COPY_pgms.zip 433.14 kB · 123 downloads I want to say THANK YOU for sharing all these Sector COPY programs. I have a 130 XE, XF551, and SIO2SD and wanted to duplicate double density floppies from ATRs (which use XBOOT/XBIOS). I tried several popular copiers like MyCopyR and Copy2000, but was getting nowhere (sometimes they would not read data from SIO2SD, sometimes formatting floppies would not work, and so on....). I then tried various versions of the programs you shared until FINALLY, DISKCOPY.ATR (option C) gave me perfectly working duplicates!! I am surprised how hard it was to find a compatible sector copiers, but I am CHUFFED!! ? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Nezgar Posted May 23, 2021 Share Posted May 23, 2021 MyCopyR does not work? Hmm maybe because it uses ultraspeed, and your setup/sio2sd has an incompatible or too high ultraspeed divisor configured. If set too high, speed limiting capacitors are still present in the computer, you could try at a lower divisor (ie $09 or $0A) At least my own SIO2SD was finicky in this respect... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted May 23, 2021 Share Posted May 23, 2021 3 hours ago, 8bit-Dude said: I want to say THANK YOU for sharing all these Sector COPY programs. I have a 130 XE, XF551, and SIO2SD and wanted to duplicate double density floppies from ATRs (which use XBOOT/XBIOS). I tried several popular copiers like MyCopyR and Copy2000, but was getting nowhere (sometimes they would not read data from SIO2SD, sometimes formatting floppies would not work, and so on....). I then tried various versions of the programs you shared until FINALLY, DISKCOPY.ATR (option C) gave me perfectly working duplicates!! I am surprised how hard it was to find a compatible sector copiers, but I am CHUFFED!! ? Good to hear, that at least one copy program is working for you and your setup. The program you are using is Diskcopy from TurboDOS XL/XE by M.Reitershan, it supports normalspeed/slowspeed, Happy, Speedy, Turbo and XF551 and also mixed floppy drives / floppy speeders. But this program is limited to 360K (DS/DD/40T) max. and Pokey divisor 5 or 6 (if you set your SIO2SD to Pokey divisor 0-4 it will not work anymore). It is always hard to find a copy program that supports normalspeed or ultraspeed and XF551 highspeed. Most XF551 copy programs support only XF highspeed and do not work with other drives then (many of these XF sectorcopy programs do not even work with standard/normal/slow drives). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mathy Posted May 23, 2021 Share Posted May 23, 2021 Hello guys From the DUP menu: J 1,2[x-y]/N 1 is the source, but can be any valid drive number 2 is the destination, but can be any valid drive number x is the first sector you want to copy y is the last sector you want to be copied. /N tells MyDOS not to format the disk and can be placed just about anywhere you want Sincerely Mathy 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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