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Apple II Archives

raoulduke

Well-known member
I'm looking for disk images - not audio files - specifically Disk Copy-compatible images.

I realize this is a potentially precarious question...  I've looked through the forum but I couldn't find much.  I recently downloaded a half-gig archive but my first test (Crystal Quest) failed.  I gather that virtually all resources are geared toward emulators - particularly KEGS.  Is there a well-known archive I'm missing?

My transfer method - well my preferred method, if this is stupid someone let me know - is through Disk Copy on an old Mac.  I can't really think of another way to get stuff to DD 3.5" floppies, and though I know I can go through the Apple ][ Disk Archive and make 5.25" disks on my IIe for the IIgs, that seems an inferior method for a variety of reasons.

 
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Elfen

Well-known member
In using Mac's Disk Copy, are you doing doing on a ProDOS Formatted Disk? From there you should be able to take it to a IIgs and then transfer it to a Apple II DOS Formatted Disk. The problem here is not to let Dosk Copy format your floppy or else it will format it as a Mac Disk and not as an Apple Disk.

The other way would be to get an old LC with the Apple IIe card, cable and at least 1 disk drive for it.

 

Elfen

Well-known member
You can also try an Emulated Apple II but I do not know if you can transfers files to a disk with an emulator. Its been a while since I used STM 88 for the Mac... a very long while (found it on my IIci's hard drive to give you an idea...)

Here's a webpage with Apple II emulation links (and other computer like the C64), and one of them is freeware and the other two (including STM 88) is shareware.

https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/01/gray/wasteland/emulator.html

Wasteland is a game that is supposed to run on these machines but I'm not linking the game, just the links to the emulated computers. From there you should be able to run Apple II software on your Mac. In the very least you should be able to test if your downloaded programs work on them before making an actual disks for them...

 

raoulduke

Well-known member
Sorry I didn't give enough info, Elfen.  I don't have problems with Disk Copy to disk.  I have noticed sometimes the images aren't formatted properly in ProDOS and I've had to copy to a new image/disk.  But this isn't that issue, it's that Disk Copy just won't open most images [or if that seems a totally alien statement, then maybe I really am doing some stuff totally wrong].  

I have problems with the images themselves not being read properly by Disk Copy.  I've tried whatever the two on MacGarden are - 4.5 (?) and 6.3.  I find that Disk Copy/Duplicator have trouble reading anything; either they give an error that the image is invalid or corrupted, or they don't see the file when opening (i.e. Cmd-O) but those might be the same problem (since I've only observed the first when dragging-and-dropping).

So that emulator seems to use (etc.) .dsk files.  Is my easiest option for images I know are good really going to be to read them in-emulator and then copy them to a prefabbed .dsk image (> Disk > IIgs)?  My concern is that that renders the archive totally useless.  I should also have mentioned that I want to use the archive over a network, so individual images is sort of at the end of my solutions list.

[stay warm, by the way!]

 
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Elfen

Well-known member
You downloading them to a PC or 10.6 for greater OSX?

Sounds to me you are losing header info (those 8 bytes that identify the file type and creator). Get Utility Dog for OS 7 - 9 and run it on a OS 9 (or OSX 10.4 or 10.5 with OS 9) and look at the files in hex mode. If the first 8 characters/bytes are 0 then the headers are gone. If it is scrambled, it could be gone but maybe recoverable. You can also use the "Change Type/Creator" tool in Utility Dog to see i it can see those 8 bytes elsewhere. It depends if the file is padded with zeros at the front or the back and Utility Dog will look at the first few (16 or 32) bytes to see if it can find it.

I looked over Disk Copy 6.3.3 (from the OS 9 Install CD which is installed on the hard drives in the "Utilities" older) on my system, and there is no mention of Apple Formatted disk. It has several options with 800K and 1.4M for Mac and 720K and 1.44 for PC DOS; but nothing for Apple II (which would be 800K or 400K ProDOS or 180K for Apple DOS {5.25in}). So that could be the problem. I do not know about about Disk Copy 4.2, I need to find one of my older machines that may have it. So it looks like Mac Disk Copy could be the problem, at least with v6.3. I'm sure that there are other utilities out there that can help. There has to be an Apple <-> Mac File converter somewhere. They were around in the 90s, so where are they now?

 

raoulduke

Well-known member
Downloading directly to 7.5.3, and Disk Copy can do ProDOS - or it had that option, anyway - but I use DiskDup+ because I've had issues with making floppies from images with Disk Copy. So it is possible that the header info was destroyed in the other end. Believe me, I didn't spend 3 hours downloading what took me like 30 seconds on a modern PC, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't headers, even though it was also zipped.

Wait... it looks like the archive I'm referring to was a zipped archive of the asimov archive, so maybe the headers were broken on the other end... weird...

 
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david__schmidt

Well-known member
It will matter exactly what image you are trying to reconstitute.  Almost none of the images on Asimov are in DC4.2 format, and there are precious few that are 800k 3.5" disk images either.  When they are, they're usually plain ProDOS-order (.po) images or .2mg images, and I don't know how well DC understands those anyway.

 

raoulduke

Well-known member
So how do you get stuff to a physical machine...?  Previously I've gotten .po files over by converting them to audio with c2t-96h.  I may have successfully converted a .2mg to Disk Copy via CiderPress (I honestly forget).  [i'm also using 6.3, not 4.2.  I don't know if the former has a more extensible format set.]

 

david__schmidt

Well-known member
Personally, I use ADTPro.  But if you want to write physical disks with a Mac instead, I prefer DiskDup - it does a much better job with a wider range of floppy drive hardware that Apple II drives are ultimately better able to read than those produced by DiskCopy of any stripe.

Now, getting an arbitrary image into a form that a Mac can understand... you're probably going to have to massage it with CiderPress, writing it as a DiskCopy 4.2 .DSK image (not to be confused with the much more popular 143k disk image, also with a .DSK suffix...).  Note that this wil only make sense on an 800k image.

 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
(not to be confused with the much more popular 143k disk image, also with a .DSK suffix...).  Note that this wil only make sense on an 800k image.
To repeat/reiterate on this point: Are the ".DSK" files you're trying to write out only about 140K in size? In which case it's a complete non sequitur to try to write those to a 3.5" disk with Disk Copy; it's both not a DiskCopy file format image *and* its contents only make sense when written to a 5 1/4" disk.

 

raoulduke

Well-known member
That's a valid point.  But as I noted, the issue is actually getting the files to mount.  Whatever the detriments, I was trying to run the overarching [archive] folder over a network, so I just needed to actually extract (and thus read/mount) the archives.  But these can't be read by DiskDup+/Disk Copy, and that's the issue at present.

I actually think Elfen was right and it was probably a corrupted archive since it was clearly the Apple image.  Notwithstanding that Apple has some copyright issues by including free access to copyrighted works it doesn't own, what's the easiest way to download the entire Asimov archive?  [Do I have to go to Trantor?]

 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
So... you have files that you're definitely 100% sure are 800k Disk Copy images but you can't get the program to look at them. Yeah, that sounds like classic "resource fork and/or type/creator info is missing" problem. My short answer there is "yes, that's annoying as all heck and the best I can suggest is look at one of the various Mac utilities there are out there for fixing that.". I've had enough issues with that in the past that I frankly sort of actively dislike that aspect of the classic Mac OS; one of the better ways to deal with it in my experience is to dump the files onto a NetaTalk server; Netatalk "fakes" a resource fork for files that don't have them so if the database is set up to ID a ".dsk" as a DiskCopy image it'll be "fixed" when you access it across the network from the Mac.

 

Elfen

Well-known member
I'm thinking that somewhere you are going to need an LC with an Apple IIe card, that hard to find cable that comes with the card (but is often lost) and an Apple II Disk Drive to access the files after you download from the archive.

After downloading to the Mac, you should be able to drop and drag to the Apple II window and deal with the file as necessary. I have the Apple IIe card but have not used it in a very long time, so I'm not sure if this drag and drop feature works though I believe it will. (I know it does with the STM-88 Apple II Emulator, but software emulation is different from hardware emulation...)

 
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raoulduke

Well-known member
A lot of the Asimov archive seems to also be .2mg.  While Ciderpress is one option, as noted I have not gotten it to work 100% of the time.  The better tool for System 9 and before is this: XGS.  I can't get iGS-PPC to run, but imageutil does and can convert to and from 2mg, which does net working images (on my IIgs).

I also just learned that my basic strategy of network running (not 100% sure about speed Gorgonops) is irrelevant because a lot of programs require the disk to be available in some form and it looks like Classic Macs won't allow sharing of disk images (?) or floppies.

 
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