burkhart87 Posted December 10, 2021 Share Posted December 10, 2021 (edited) Hi, I'm a long time reader and a nearly first time post-er. I grew up in the early 80's programming, playing games and sorta BBS-ing with an 800, Trak AT-D2, 850 and 830 acoustic (!). The 800 and Trak are pictured below and still work fine. I still have the 850 and 830 but have not used them since the 80's. Anyway, to the interesting (to me at least) portion of this post, around 1997 I picked up an extra 800, a 1050 and a mother load of floppies for $50 from a guy in Long Island. We were living in Manhattan and I was jonesing for an 8-bit fix because my 800 was in Ohio. Maybe the seller is a member here because judging from the collection he sold to me, and the Atari 8-bit stuff he was not selling, he was VERY into the Atari 8-bit scene back in the day. Holy Moly. A Pirate's Treasure Chest indeed. I've cataloged two of the smaller boxes in the back row of the pic and that was 185 discs. Going through them over the years I've noticed very few blanks or unlabeled discs. I've done my best to document what this collection contains over the last couple months, transferring these discs to ATRs via a 10502USB cable and the Atarimax software. I've attached a spreadsheet of what I have done so far. Anything listed as an "original disc" is precisely that and I've made no attempts to prepare an ATR from them. Some are not to be found on Atarimania, so maybe these can be useful in archiving original discs. The same is true of the some of the pirated software. I've tried to note this in the spreadsheet. Take a look through the spreadsheet if this interests you. It's a nice mix of games, utilities, and languages. I'm happy to do whatever I can in preserving and sharing this software. I'll provide updates to the spreadsheet as I go a long. DiscLibrary.ods DiscLibrary.xls Edited December 10, 2021 by burkhart87 9 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burkhart87 Posted December 10, 2021 Author Share Posted December 10, 2021 Here are some screenshots of what I find interesting going through these old discs; handles, names, phone numbers, etc. And a humble brag about my high score on Jumpman, that old disc still boots. It's amazing that I've encountered so few discs that give me problems. There are a few (Lode Runner, arrgghh), but that is a topic for another post. minioffice2.mp4 TheFix.mp4 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted December 10, 2021 Share Posted December 10, 2021 You will want to make atx and vapii back ups until you can kroflux or scp flux stream image the disks... That will make a useful reference for people to work on or through. If you can't or don't want to use a greaseweazle , kryoflux, or SCP... there are folks in the preservation thread who appear to be more than willing able and happy to do so for you Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burkhart87 Posted January 2, 2022 Author Share Posted January 2, 2022 DiscLibraryJan2022.xls Updated spreadsheet of images from this library. Most of the new stuff is utilities. And...some more screenshots of stuff I found amusing or unusual. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DjayBee Posted January 2, 2022 Share Posted January 2, 2022 Never heard of Syn-Tax before. Bring on the dump. @Farb did you? 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burkhart87 Posted January 3, 2022 Author Share Posted January 3, 2022 Here you go. I don't remember if the B side has anything useful. SynTax.ATR SynTaxB.ATR 4 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FULS Posted January 3, 2022 Share Posted January 3, 2022 SynTax is a BASIC program, so have BASIC enabled to work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DjayBee Posted January 3, 2022 Share Posted January 3, 2022 3 hours ago, burkhart87 said: Here you go. I don't remember if the B side has anything useful. Many thanks. Side B contains the printer menus. Flip the disk before selecting it from the menu. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DjayBee Posted January 4, 2022 Share Posted January 4, 2022 I found something about Syn-Tax at https://www.quillandcamera.com/the-ron-pearl-interview/: And great pictures in there as well. "In the 1980’s with the advent of the new personal computers I taught myself BASIC and wrote an income tax program that was marketed by Synapse Software Co." 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tuxon86 Posted January 5, 2022 Share Posted January 5, 2022 I bought a lot of about 500 Atari floppies from an ex BBS operator. I'm waiting on my Sio2PC and Sio2SD to come in the mail and I'll start going through them. I did a C64 lot a year and a half ago with my ZoomFloppy and a 1571. I love going thru those old floppies, it's like a treasure hunt. 4 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Allan Posted January 5, 2022 Share Posted January 5, 2022 1 hour ago, Tuxon86 said: I bought a lot of about 500 Atari floppies from an ex BBS operator. I'm waiting on my Sio2PC and Sio2SD to come in the mail and I'll start going through them. I did a C64 lot a year and a half ago with my ZoomFloppy and a 1571. I love going thru those old floppies, it's like a treasure hunt. Looking forward to what you find. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted January 5, 2022 Share Posted January 5, 2022 2 hours ago, Tuxon86 said: I bought a lot of about 500 Atari floppies from an ex BBS operator. I'm waiting on my Sio2PC and Sio2SD to come in the mail and I'll start going through them. I did a C64 lot a year and a half ago with my ZoomFloppy and a 1571. I love going thru those old floppies, it's like a treasure hunt. Did you ever release the C64 dumps? If you did, any pointers to them, if not then it's all good...I like going through floppies or images myself.. Paul.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tuxon86 Posted January 5, 2022 Share Posted January 5, 2022 1 minute ago, Mclaneinc said: Did you ever release the C64 dumps? If you did, any pointers to them, if not then it's all good...I like going through floppies or images myself.. Paul.. I'm at work and Google Drive is unnavailable here, but I'll post a link when I get back home. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted January 5, 2022 Share Posted January 5, 2022 Oh, thank you.. Appreciated.. Paul.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Farb Posted January 5, 2022 Share Posted January 5, 2022 On 1/2/2022 at 11:46 PM, DjayBee said: Never heard of Syn-Tax before. Bring on the dump. @Farb did you? It is mentioned in the December 1983 issue of Antic but I had assumed it was vaporware since I've never seen it surface until now: https://archive.org/details/1983-12-anticmagazine/page/n95/mode/2up Thanks for contributing it @burkhart87. Please let me know if you need someone to assist in flux dumping your original disks so they can be preserved. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tuxon86 Posted January 5, 2022 Share Posted January 5, 2022 4 hours ago, Mclaneinc said: Did you ever release the C64 dumps? If you did, any pointers to them, if not then it's all good...I like going through floppies or images myself.. Paul.. Back from work.... ZoomFloppy works like a charm with a 1571 since that drive has the necessary hardware to do a more efficient job. On a 1541 you've to make a parallel cable and fiddle with the internal of the drive. My strategy was to use the ZoomFloppy with OpenCBM to create a .G64 image of the disk. I then used DirMaster v3.1.5 to browse the disk image. For games and application that used full sides or multiple disks, I kept them in .g64 format. If the disk held many individual games/apps, as it's often the case with old BBS related disk, I then created a unique .d64 image for each title and copied the related files to it. I then test each one with C64 Forever 8/Vice to see if I missed a file or if the game/app functionned properly. In those 1,200 floppies there were many, I mean a ridiculous number of duplicates, again something common back in the day with floppy based BBS since the sysop created disk with the most popular titles to "share" with their clients. So, here's my archive of those disk: My C64 Archive I'm planning to do the same with the Atari floppies I have if that's possible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted January 5, 2022 Share Posted January 5, 2022 and remember all those Atari on one side, some other computer on the other side... disks You prolly have some a8 title on the flip side of the C disks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tuxon86 Posted January 5, 2022 Share Posted January 5, 2022 5 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said: and remember all those Atari on one side, some other computer on the other side... disks You prolly have some a8 title on the flip side of the C disks The previous owner was operating a strictly Commodore BBS. Nothing else on those disk than C64/128 programs. In Montreal, back in the day, the “system” war was fought hard and no mercy was given! I consider myself luck for having found those floppies lot locally. How many have just thrown those floppies away when they moved to PC… kind of like in The BBS Documentary where the old sysop is showing his wall of 360k and 1.2meg shareware floppy collection and saying to the host that all of that fitted on 2 optical discs… Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted January 5, 2022 Share Posted January 5, 2022 Not purchased disks then but rather mostly BBS warez disks and backups for C? Hopefully your Atari lot has a good mix of all the different types of disks... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tuxon86 Posted January 6, 2022 Share Posted January 6, 2022 11 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said: Not purchased disks then but rather mostly BBS warez disks and backups for C? Hopefully your Atari lot has a good mix of all the different types of disks... Not many BBS dealt in originals. And for common folks in Canada, a computer was a luxury in the early 80’s. As a reference my father brought home about $225 a week working in ship repair. No way he was ever able to buy me a $600 setup with $50 games. I got my first system because I was friend with a guy who had a repair shop and had access to “reconditioned” machine at a discount. He fixed me up with my first C64, a homemade PSU and a 1541 with a broken case. I later worked a summer to add a 130XE and a CoCo2 to the family. I never even saw an original piece of software until about 1988 when I bought a used copie of Ultima III, and the the first SSI gold box, Pool of Radiance. BBS pirated downloads, or copies from some friend who had a modem was how we had access to software. Hell, there were even pirated software stores operating in the 80’s in Montreal, the two best known were Crazy Irving and Info-Montreal. You went there, picked what you wanted from a printed list, pay and walk out with a stack of pirated soft. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_The Doctor__ Posted January 6, 2022 Share Posted January 6, 2022 (edited) Hah I seem to recall some talk of crazy irving, the US counterpart to crazy eddy... their prices were insane! as in insanely cheap... lol Edited January 6, 2022 by _The Doctor__ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burkhart87 Posted January 6, 2022 Author Share Posted January 6, 2022 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burkhart87 Posted January 6, 2022 Author Share Posted January 6, 2022 5 hours ago, Farb said: It is mentioned in the December 1983 issue of Antic but I had assumed it was vaporware since I've never seen it surface until now: https://archive.org/details/1983-12-anticmagazine/page/n95/mode/2up Thanks for contributing it @burkhart87. Please let me know if you need someone to assist in flux dumping your original disks so they can be preserved. I almost pulled the trigger on a supercard setup, but, that's a luxury I really don't need for what I'm doing. Do you want me to mail the discs? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burkhart87 Posted January 6, 2022 Author Share Posted January 6, 2022 (edited) Here are some more that I think are pretty novel. I did find Scott Lahteine (link below) the author of "The Tracer" and have tried contacting him 'cuz it looks as if he has lost all copies of Tracer. https://www.thinkyhead.com/about Tracer2.ATR XLEmulator.ATR Edited January 6, 2022 by burkhart87 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mclaneinc Posted January 6, 2022 Share Posted January 6, 2022 (edited) Thanks @Tuxon86, will look at the disks later.. Happy archiving the Atari stuff, there's always a chance (as seen already) of a person having an insanely rare title in their stash. Everything that is passed on is very, very appreciated.. Paul.. PS H.e.r.o.g64 is actually Hotwheels Just having a random look.. Edited January 6, 2022 by Mclaneinc 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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