how to make physical floppy disks using a ADE lite and a physical disk drive

[rietveld]

Hi. Is it possible to make a physical disk from a. Dsk? 

 

I have a real drive and a ADE lite connected with a 'y' cable 

 

 

[NIAD]

The ADE LITE does not allow one to mount/unmount disk images on the fly  (unlike the full version of the ADE or ADE PRO) so the only EOS program that you could load from the ADE LITE and then copy to a 5 1/4" disk would be a copy utility such as File Manager.

 

If you are dealing with CP/M or T-DOS disk images, you could place the system (SYSGEN) on each disk image to make them bootable and then just copy the files over to a 5 1/4" disk.

 

I'll have to look over John Lundy's posts about the ADE LITE to confirm the above and to see if there are any workarounds.

[rietveld]

2 hours ago, NIAD said:

The ADE LITE does not allow one to mount/unmount disk images on the fly  (unlike the full version of the ADE or ADE PRO) so the only EOS program that you could load from the ADE LITE and then copy to a 5 1/4" disk would be a copy utility such as File Manager.

 

If you are dealing with CP/M or T-DOS disk images, you could place the system (SYSGEN) on each disk image to make them bootable and then just copy the files over to a 5 1/4" disk.

 

I'll have to look over John Lundy's posts about the ADE LITE to confirm the above and to see if there are any workarounds.

Thanks for looking into it.   I was thinking that if I just had the boot file and a single. Dsk on the sd card? 

[Tekman]

You can change disk images on the fly by way of the swap button. I’ll explain the whole process below from the very beginning, even starting with ADE Lite configuration.

 

Per the instructions that came with the ADE Lite, disable Drive 2 buy holding the swap button during power on of the console. This will allow the real physical drive to be Drive 2 without conflict on ADAMnet and the ADE Lite will be Drive 1. Just make sure your physical drive is switched to Drive 2. Note that this configuration will remain even when powered off. Holding the swap button during power on again will revert back to Drive 2 enabled again.

 

With that said, It’s not elegant making floppy disk copies from the ADE Lite with normal EOS. The option for having an ADE Lite and physical drive together was mostly for playing nice with each other and doing standard file save and copying back and forth.

 

The ADE Lite wasn’t really designed for making a lot of physical floppy backups. This is how it’s done. For example, I like to use File Manager v3.0 because it is full-featured and will format floppies and make block copies/backups. This is where I have a dedicated SD card for doing this to make it easier, just make sure you move the boot.dsk to the new SD card so the ADE Lite will boot. You will select and boot your favorite copy program disk image in Image Manager as usual. For example, I rename ‘File Manager v3.0 (1992) (AJM Software).dsk to ‘copy.dsk’ to simplify things. This is where you take advantage of the swap button feature on the ADE Lite. You are allowed to use up to 3 more disk images to choose from. In my case, they are copy.ds2, copy.ds3, and copy.ds4. Once the backup program is loaded into memory, it is now possible to press the swap button to choose the disk image you want to copy to physical media. I recommend you write down what images you renamed to *.ds2-ds3 so you don’t get confused. The key is all the image file names need to be exact, except for the extension. Each press of the swap button will advance to the next image, just count the LED blinks to verify you are on the correct image you want.

 

This all sounds more confusing than it really is, you’ll get the hang of it, even though the process is a little convoluted.

[rietveld]

Thank you.   

[ed1475]

If you have an old MS-DOS computer (or Windows 95, 98,98SE, ME) with a 5.25" disk drive, you can use "The Adam Connection" software to format disks for ADAM and DCOPY software to convert .DSK images to 5.25" ADAM disks.

Edited January 6, 2020 by ed1475

[rietveld]

On 1/5/2020 at 10:37 AM, Tekman said:

You can change disk images on the fly by way of the swap button. I’ll explain the whole process below from the very beginning, even starting with ADE Lite configuration.

 

Per the instructions that came with the ADE Lite, disable Drive 2 buy holding the swap button during power on of the console. This will allow the real physical drive to be Drive 2 without conflict on ADAMnet and the ADE Lite will be Drive 1. Just make sure your physical drive is switched to Drive 2. Note that this configuration will remain even when powered off. Holding the swap button during power on again will revert back to Drive 2 enabled again.

 

With that said, It’s not elegant making floppy disk copies from the ADE Lite with normal EOS. The option for having an ADE Lite and physical drive together was mostly for playing nice with each other and doing standard file save and copying back and forth.

 

The ADE Lite wasn’t really designed for making a lot of physical floppy backups. This is how it’s done. For example, I like to use File Manager v3.0 because it is full-featured and will format floppies and make block copies/backups. This is where I have a dedicated SD card for doing this to make it easier, just make sure you move the boot.dsk to the new SD card so the ADE Lite will boot. You will select and boot your favorite copy program disk image in Image Manager as usual. For example, I rename ‘File Manager v3.0 (1992) (AJM Software).dsk to ‘copy.dsk’ to simplify things. This is where you take advantage of the swap button feature on the ADE Lite. You are allowed to use up to 3 more disk images to choose from. In my case, they are copy.ds2, copy.ds3, and copy.ds4. Once the backup program is loaded into memory, it is now possible to press the swap button to choose the disk image you want to copy to physical media. I recommend you write down what images you renamed to *.ds2-ds3 so you don’t get confused. The key is all the image file names need to be exact, except for the extension. Each press of the swap button will advance to the next image, just count the LED blinks to verify you are on the correct image you want.

 

This all sounds more confusing than it really is, you’ll get the hang of it, even though the process is a little convoluted.

 

 

[NIAD]

Great job rietveld! I am glad to see that you were able to acquire an actual ADAM Disk Drive from Doubledown after another member here bought the one that I was selling before you could get back to me.

 

As far as using the BACKUP option in File Manager, it works and works well but I would use the COPY BLOCKS option and then proceed to copy all the blocks (the range would be 00 thru 159 on a standard 160K disk/disk image) on the disk image or actual disk to the destination media. Some programs use non-standard directories and others have data stored/hidden in what should be unused blocks per a directory listing and the BACKUP option could miss this since it reads the directory and only copies the used blocks.

 

Have you checked out the ColecoVision Experience disk image volumes that MilliV created. If not, here is the link: http://adamware.us/

 

ed1475 makes a good suggestion as well. If you have an older PC that can be booted into DOS and has a 5 1/4" FDD, you can use the DOS programs "The ADAM Connection" (EOS.EXE), 22Disk (for CP/M stuff) and "DCOPY" to handle all your file and disk image transferring/creation. I prefer this method myself so as not to put all the wear and tear on my ADAM hardware... much easier to find an old PC to work as ADAM's slave.

 

[rietveld]

I will use the COPY command when I make more disks. I didn't even think about that.   

 

Btw on a side note.    Did coleco every use copy-protected disks?

[NIAD]

4 hours ago, rietveld said:

I will use the COPY command when I make more disks. I didn't even think about that.   

 

Btw on a side note.    Did coleco every use copy-protected disks?

Coleco never released an ADAM program or CV cart that was copy protected.

 

Activision actually implemented code in 4 of their games that would prevent a rom dump from working on the ADAM. Guess they got wise after the ADAM was released. These particular games have been hacked so that they work correctly on the ADAM.

 

Walters Software Co., M.M.S.G. and a few others used copy protection measures in some of their programs which was usually a Bad Block check routine. A number of programs released by Digital Express and a few others have a serial # check routine after booting up a certain number of times.

 

Edited January 17, 2020 by NIAD