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Friday, 10 September 2021 07:30

Atari ST Disk Transfers

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These are a collection of notes for newbies. I point to other peoples work and highlight the main points.

Imaging Methods

Use the MSA (Magic Shadow Archiver) file format as it stores disk geometry and other things which can get around some weak disk protections.

Floppy Image & file transfer program (best)

This is a modern Windows based disk acquisition and image file handler. It will handle some copy protections I believe but not all, for that you will need a KyroFlux device.

Their instructions are straight forward and I guide you to them for further advise.

Make Disk

This is the simplest method to image disks using DOS but is an old way of doing it becasue of the use of DOS. Also makedisk cannot handle copy protected disks.

  • Create a PC running DOS 6.22 (or FreeDOS should be fine) and Hard Drive formatted in FAT32 which does not have to be to large
  • Copy the makedisk command onto the harddrive
  • Use a command similar to these below 
    makedisk /read /auto /msa /slow TEST.ST  (this creates an image from a floppy disk)
makedisk /write c:\test\TEST.MSA /auto   (this writes an image to a floppy disk)
    • /slow is used on disks that you are having trouble reading, but does not harm when running on healthy disks either, it is just more thorough
    • /msa is used to specify the outputted image image should be a Magic Shadow Archiver formatted file. 

Pasti

Pasti can handle protected disks and other images but you need a real ST to use this software.

OniFlop

This can handle a wide variety of disks including Atari ST. I am not sure how well it handles copy proteced disks.

Notes

  • PaCifiST, an emulator, on a PC can be used to access the floppy drive without windows stepping in between.  You can use formatting tools with it. from here
  • Is it possible to use Pasti to copy disks in an emulator? see WTF is "Pasti" - Atari ST/TT/Falcon Computers - AtariAge Forums
  • Windows 10 is blocking access to 720kb disks when using USB?
  • Internal 3.5 FDD are better than USB ones.

Links

  • Misc
  • Forums
  • Useful Sites
  • Floppy Drive and Disk image format information
    • Atari ST Preservation & Backup | Info-Coach - A document that describes the copy protection mechanisms used on Atari mainly from a "hardware point of view" (e.g. detail analysis of the flux transitions sampled from FD) and not from a "software point of view" (how a program tests these protections).
    • Atari ST Protection Mechanisms | Info-Coach - This page presents several Atari Floppy Disks image's formats. These images can be used for emulation or for preservation backup / copy of original Atari floppy disks. Some of these formats can be used directly (for example Pasti STX) in hardware / software emulators while some other may require to be converted (for example Kryoflux Stream files) by program like Aufit. This explains all of the different image formats.
    • Atari ST Diskette Information | Atari ST FD Information - This page contains quite a lot of information related to the Atari ST diskettes: This includes information on the Floppy Disk Media (down to the flux level), the FD Drives, the FD controller, the FD copy protection mechanisms, the FD layouts , FD specific hardware solutions, etc ... The end goal is to help the understanding of the duplication (backup) of Atari ST diskettes (protected or not) and this should not be confuse with a preservation project like PASTI.
    • List of floppy disk formats - Wikipedia
    • Pasti (STX) floppy image format - This description is based mostly on Markus Fritze's article. He is floppy expert and made some protections for Atari ST in past. I added couple things to it + rearranged some parts . Made without format's author contribution, this is certainly not complete. May contain some minor errors, but intention is to help people who want to do something more with thousands of STX images available - and not just playing under emulators.
    • Really Atari ST? | Hacker News - An interesting thread on this topic.
    • Atari ST Protection Mechanisms - Describes some of the protections used by the Atari ST as well as techniques to reproduce copy protected FD.
    • MSA vs ST
      • ST format does not hold parameters of floppies separately, it uses values from boot sector. They are correct in most cases, but some titles have invalid values in boot sectors. Very likely such titles will not work with Image Runner, since they use not regular filesystem. MSA format is better - it holds in header physical floppy parameters as track count, sectors/track and side count. Unfortunately, there is a lot of oversized floppy images on DL sites. Often there is too much track without need, single sided floppy imaged as double sized etc. It is useful to read what writes about how to copy such titles/menus and then doing new image only with used tracks. How? Writing out to floppy (some in good shape), and then imaging with correct parameters. Or better do it without physical floppy, in emulators.
      • MSA is better format than ST - it holds some useful infos (floppy Geom.) which helps with non-standard floppy formats.
    • Image Formats
      • ST = The orginal disk image.
      • MSA = Magic Shadow Archiver, A standard ST image with a MSA header contained in a compressed archive
      • STX = Supports copy protected disks
      • STT = not sure  what this is but i think it supports copy protected disks
    • Q75131: Standard Floppy Disk Formats Supported by MS-DOS | KnowledgeBase Archive - An Archive of Early Microsoft KnowledgeBase Article on Floppy disk formats MS-DOS used.
    • MSWIN4.1 FD Boot Record - Complete examination of Microsoft's MSWIN4.1 Floppy Disk Boot Record.
    • Check your floppy can write weird formats
    • Some formats information
      PC 720KB disk (79 Tracks ??)
ST 720KB disk (80 Sectors/Tracks Cylinders 9, Sides 2) 
ST 720KB : track=80, head=2, sector=9, block=512
PC 1.44MB (18 Sectors/Tracks, Cylinders 80, Sides 2)
    • List of floppy disk formats - Wikipedia
    • Floppy Disk Formats | Phil Storrs PC Hardware book - A teardown of a Floppy Disk Drive.
  • Formatting a disk in windows
    • Formatting a 720K floppy disk over USB fails with Windows 10 - Retrocomputing Stack Exchange
      • This tells you about swapping the driver that Windows is using for the USB drive.
      • ufiformat
        • If you have a Linux system handy, you can determine your drives’ capabilities by querying it with these following commands
        • ufiformat -i or ufiformat /dev/sda
        • Make sure there is a DD disk in the drive and if it displays the expected data then your USB FDD read DD disks
        • You will most likely have to download this when prompted.
        • You might need to use sudo if you dont have permission.
        • manual here
      • High-density and double-density disks use magnetic media with different coercivity, requiring different field strengths to write data; a double-density drive can’t reliably format or alter a disk that’s been written to by a high-density drive. 1.44MB disks are not ideal to be used as DD because they have different magnetic strengths to DD disks.
      • Note that the holes in disks’ cases don’t determine the formats one-for-one. A DD disk will always end up formatted in double-density, and a DD drive will always format in double-density. An HD drive can theoretically operate in both modes (and will do so automatically with a DD disk). An HD disk can be formatted as a DD in a HD drive, but as mentioned previously will be unreliable in a DD drive; an HD disk formatted as a DD in a DD drive will work fine. You can use DD disks as HD by drilling an extra hole but then you’re taking your chances with the magnetic support.
      • use a dos prompt to format a 720KB disk:  format a: /t:80 /n:9 because DD formatting removed in the Windows GUI and has to be done through the command line
      • You can use 1.44MB disks as DD disks by covering up the hole that is not the write protect. This is a light sensitive trigger and not a physical one so using transparent sellotape will not work, the material has to be opaque.
      • Not all USB drives support 720KB
    • 720k Floppies with Windows 10 and a USB Floppy drive. - Atari-Forum
      • Just to be clear, some (including some new-ish) USB drives support 720k but not all of them. All of them support 1.4M.
      • Also, the motors in them will not always turn slightly stiff disks fast enough for it to access data on the disk.
    • DOS Command: DRIVPARM - Used in the CONFIG.SYS file to set parameters for a disk drive.
    • How to Format floppies - My Notes
      • The only way to format a floppy consistently is to use a windows 98SE boot disk (put it on a pendrive)
      • This is a dumb formatter and ignores a lot of issues and just formats the disk.
      • Other methods using the 3rd party tools might help fix more corrupted disks, but 98se formats amiga disks ok.
      • External USB drives do not all support 720kb disks and are not as sensitive as a standard internal floppy drive, so avoid them at all cost. You sanity depends on it.
      • If after you have formatted a disk in win98se successfully and the disk still does not work, then it is probably corrupt and needs chucking in the bin (if you are sure you hardware is ok)
      • USB FDD drives don't do 720KB disk mainly because of the driver, not the hardware. ie try in linux, but I cannot guarantee this will work either because the USB drives are cheap and might be hardware encoded just to do 1.44MB disks.
    • Format a 1.44MB floppy disk in windows 7 using an internal drive
      • Format command 
        format a: /f:720
format a: /t:80 /n:9
      • This will reformat Amiga disks
    • Windows will not format a 720KB disk
      • I think the only way is to use Windows 7 or lower and then you have to use the command prompt.
    • NFormat Floppy Disk Formatter
      • NFORMAT is a disk formatter designed to dynamically format floppy disks for MS/PC-DOS. The internal parameter editor or command line options let you specify parameters that allow you to get up to 23% more data space from your floppy disks.
  • Trouble Shooting Floppy Disks in Windows
  • Floppy Disk Imaging Software
    • Floppy Image & file transfer program
      • This seems to be the goto imaging software which will handle a lot (not all) exotic formats. It requires an internal FDD 3.5 inch drive and controller which it uses a custom low level floppy driver which overrides limitations of standard Windows floppy drivers.
      • Not sure it does copy protected disks.
      • It does over sized disks
      • Can convert MSA to ST. And can write MSA images onto floppies, so even no need for conversion.
    • OmniFlop
      • A 'universal' floppy disk reader, writer, and tester for the IBM PC or compatible which can handle alien floppy and exotic disk formats not normally supported by DOS, Windows and Linux. It was first released in December 2004. this will read many different formats including a multitude of Atari ST formats, a complete list is available on its homepage. The documentation says you need an internal FDD to use it but the a tutorial above uses a USB drive.
      • dd -or- OMNIFLOP -or- SDISKW ? | llamamusic.com - Using "dd", OmniFlop or SDISKW depends on the method you create sample disks or image files. Each one has an advantage over the other.
      • This has its own driver which you manually have to install. This drive also requires the driver enforcement to be disabled.
    • Pasti Atari ST Imaging & Preservation Tools
      • Our main goal is the preservation of Atari software in its original unmodified form. Original software is normally stored on diskettes with custom format or copy protection.
      • Pasti is a package of software tools for imaging and preservation of Atari software. The two major components are the imaging tools and the emulation helper tools. This has tools for windows and real Atari ST.
      • This software will copy disks using a single floppy disk, an Atari ST and a PC. http://pasti.fxatari.com/
      • The imaging tools produce a disk image file from an original disk. It works very similarly to standard imaging tools like Makedisk, but they can image virtually any ST disk including copy protected disks.
      • I think this creates STX images with the copy protection in tact.
      • WTF is "Pasti" - Atari ST/TT/Falcon Computers - AtariAge Forums - Pasti explained in simple terms.
      • Quickstart guide for making Pasti-images | atari-forum.com
      • Pasti can be used to run exotic disks images (protected) in emulators and then allow the extraction of them.
    • MakeDisk
      • Might not work properly on anything later than XP
      • No official site, available on the internet though.
      • v1.5 is the latetst I could find
    • Windows Floppy Disk Copy (wfdcopy) | SourceForge.net
      • wfdcopy is a floppy disk image maker for Windows, its main purpose is to read floppy disks into image-files but it can be used to write them back or to copy a disk
      • It was wrote mainly to convert floppy disks into image-files for use in emulators, especially Atari ST emulators (that why the filename extension is ".st" by default).
      • It should read any Atari ST and PC disks, including "overformatted" ST disks.
      • if you have something else than a *real* 3"1/2 1.44Mb floppy drive then your drive is not supported and wfdcopy may not work properly.
    • MSA Converter Website - MSA Converter is an utility destinated to convert and manipulate the disk image files used by ATARI ST emulators. It is designed to work with Windows 95 and more. It also allows to view some of the graphic image formats used on Atari directly from disk images or from the hard disk.
    • STDISK, Image writing utility for Atari ST disk images. - STDISK is our new utility to get those pescy Atari ST .st and .msa images onto innocent, unsuspecting DD (and wannabe DD) floppies... As this was something that gave us more trouble than was good for anybody, we've started making this utility. 
    • hmsa - Atari MSA / ST disk image creator and converter | Ubuntu Manpage - A linux utility
    • fdrawcmd.sys | simonowen.com
      • A floppy filter driver for Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7/8/10.
      • The driver exposes command-level access to the µPD765a floppy disk controller, making it possible to read/write many non-standard and copy-protected disk formats.
      • This is the low level driver a lot of ST imaging programs use.
    • SAMdisk | Simonowen.com
      • SAMdisk is a command-line disk image utility for Windows, Linux, and macOS.
      • Read and write almost any soft-sectored floppy disk format compatible with the PC floppy controller, including some traditionally copy-protected formats. Also supports hard disk imaging to and from HDF and raw formats.
      • Low-level floppy device access requires the fdrawcmd.sys driver to be installed.
    • DD for Windows
    • Floppy Image - Win3x.Org
      • The 1.5.2 version of floppy disk is the last freeware of this program. This program, made in 2001, can make images of 5.25 and 3.5 inches floppies in 360k, 1.2 mb, 720k and 1.44 mb. It can make them in .IMG, .IMZ(compressed) and in .EXE. It can work under windows 95 and nt 4.0 minimum and waise only 316kb. You should also notice that the program only work in windows 95 with some updated .dll, which are included in the .7z file.
      • Read and write Atari ST floppy disks with a PC and an USB drive | YouTube | Vretrocomputing - Read and write Atari ST 720 KB floppy disks directly with a PC and an USB floppy drive. Convert real 720 KB floppies into ST files, and conversely.
    • Image runner for Atari ST(E) machines - Floppy image mounting on real Ataris
  • Disk Images in Linux
  • Formatting floppy disks in Linux
  • Collections of disk transfer Tools
    • Disks Tools - Atari ST - Essential software (The List) - Both PC and ST utilities, very useful. Many other utilities aswell.
    • ST-Utils - Small programs to help you out on your Atari or on your pc .... With everything you need to archive your old games or to create ST game disks from the files on this site ...
  • Imaging Tutorials
  • Disk Recovery Software
    • GitHub - ChrisBertrandDotNet/ST-Recover
      • ST Recover can read Atari ST floppy disks on a PC under Windows
      • ST Recover can read Atari ST floppy disks on a PC under Windows, including special formats as 800 or 900 KB and damaged or desynchronized disks, and produces standard .ST disk image files. Then the image files can be read in ST emulators as WinSTon or Steem.
    • Old Floppy Disks Won't Read | Motherboard Forums - I have 20 old floppy disks I need to access. They are high-densitydisks. They were bought pre-formatted, and the files were saved with Windows 95. I am now trying to access them using a PC running Windows XP Pro SP2. But I get: "The disk in drive A is not formatted. Would you like to format it now?"
  • Other Hardware
    • HxC Floppy Emulator | HxC2001 HeadQuarters - A Universal Floppy Disk Drive Emulator. The HxC Floppy Emulator project main idea is to completely replace the floppy disk drive by an electronic device. This electronic device emulate the floppy disk drive behavior and functionnalities.
    • Jookie's home page » UltraSatan - The Ultrasatan is a hard disk replacement for your Atari ST - and it uses SD cards for storage. Whilst not specifically intended for file transfer, by partitioning and formatting the SD card in the right way, you can mount the SD card on both your PC and ST - and hence use it to transfer files.
    • KryoFlux
      • KryoFlux is a USB-based device designed specifically for the reliability and precision needed to acquire reliable low-level reads suitable for software preservation.
      • This is the official hardware developed by The Software Preservation Society, an authority in authentic floppy disk imaging and preservation.
      • LGR - Kryoflux USB Floppy Disk Controller Overview - YouTube - A demonstration and overview of the capabilities of the Kryoflux USB High Definition Flux Sampler.
    • Arduino Nano Floppy Emulator For When Your Disk Is Not Accessible | Hackaday - Among the plethora of obsolete removable media there are some which are lamented, but it can be difficult to find those who regret the passing of the floppy disk.
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