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1. Denis Warburton (artandtechnic@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 15:35:19 JST Denis Warburton

   Now, in an earlier-than-expected Atari floppy disk mishegoss update….

   • After considerable searching, I located an ›FTP site‹ — *not under the author’s control* — which hosts multiple versions of `a8rawconv` from 2014-2015.

   • I discovered that _these_ ZIP files contained source code.

   • Based on the rambling-and-rarely-focused “official” discussion of the software in a forum (!!), I successfully compiled version 0.8.

   • I then speed corrected a ready flux image, ran it thru a8rawconv, and…

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 15:35:17 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     @artandtechnic I can imagine the c64 being a very hard system for this, since games can (and did!) upload new code to the disk drive. That probably results in some very gnarly protection schemes

   • Denis Warburton (artandtechnic@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 15:35:18 JST Denis Warburton

     in reply to

     I’ll have to try this workflow with the remaining disks that we wrote with our old Atari system, not only to see if it works for those as well, but also to discover how good the disk images are. I won’t know whether or not I’ll need to redo the fluxes until I can go through this process. (Since it’s impossible to read the disks with other tools!)

     Notably, I’ll also have to look up how to use a bloody Atari… because I don’t remember after all these years!! 😂

   • Denis Warburton (artandtechnic@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 15:35:18 JST Denis Warburton

     in reply to

     (

     Irritated Aside:

     I wish it were just as easy to create working disk images of copy protected software for the Commodore 64… alas, I haven’t found a way of managing that yet.

     Apparently, the cool kids making the conversion software only like working with real 1541 floppy drives… which is partially understandable (but a lengthier digression).

     )

   • Denis Warburton (artandtechnic@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 15:35:19 JST Denis Warburton

     in reply to

     … was shocked to discover that this disk image - which is copy protected - actually booted.

     Immediately - and successfully!

     I made a point of making sure the software worked by thoroughly thrashing the computer player in a little over 90 seconds.

     😂