Laine Houghton wrote: > "Chris M" wrote in message > news:4me870959eoaebfbshrptc806uaf7emav8@4ax.com... >> Can someone point me to software that lets me do a nibble copy of a >> disk? Any way to get the .nib image to a PC easily? > > The server is a little slow. > http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/apple2/utility/sst.zip Some notes... SST creates a fixed-length image of each track. For this reason, nibble counting is impossible to replicate. You're probably out of luck for track synchronization as well. Each disk side turns into two, which are then transferred like any other unprotected disk (e.g. with ADT over a serial cable, or if you have the hardware, with ShrinkIt and AppleTalk). The two images are then recombined by running SST in an emulator or with CiderPress. It's a slow and somewhat painful process, but it'll work for disks with simple forms of copy protection. Sometimes it has been used to preserve the volume number embedded in the sector headers of an otherwise unprotected disk. In theory the volume number can be stored on a "sector" image in 2IMG format, but I don't know which emulators respect the value. On the whole you're better off with a "cracked" disk than a nibble image. -- Send mail to fadden@fadden.com (Andy McFadden) - http://www.fadden.com/ CD-Recordable FAQ - http://www.cdrfaq.org/ CiderPress Apple II archive utility for Windows - http://www.faddensoft.com/ Fight Internet Spam - http://spam.abuse.net/spam/ & http://spamcop.net/ Chris M writes ... > > Can someone point me to software that lets me do a nibble copy of a > disk? Any way to get the .nib image to a PC easily? > Unfortunately, Saltine's Super Transcopy (SST) was designed to transfer copy-protected disks using just 5.25" media. It was not designed to create .nib files you could store on 800k diskettes or hard disk. So, creating a .nib with SST involves a transfer and combining process such as described by Andy. If you are not set up for transferring the disks SST creates via ADT or some other NULL modem connection, you might save some bother using DISK2FDI to read the diskettes on your PC: http://home.swbell.net/rubywand/Csa2DSKETTE.html#007 http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi If the reason for making a .nib image is just to preserve Volume Number-- i.e. the original is not actually copy-protected-- you can avoid the SST route. Just transfer the original (via ADT, etc. or DISK2FDI). Then, under DOS 3.3 on AppleWin, INIT a .nib with the correct Volume Number. Copy the contents of the disk image to the .nib-- e.g. use COPYA w/o doing a format. (See http://home.swbell.net/rubywand/Csa2FLUTILS.html#018 .) Rubywand Disk2FDI does a nibble read and then analyses the bit stream to produce a track read. That is then 'analysed again' to extract the sector data. It is then written to a dsk file as sector data. If the disk is copy protected then the 'second pass' analyse fails to locate sector data. If Disk2FDI were modified to analyse start of track and write out a fixed length, it too could do nib images. SST is a cool program. (I have the source disk.) Essentially it uses the EDD source code to read a track and analyse it to find start and arbitrarily end it at a fixed length. There is no reason that someone couldn't write a Q&D program to do that without the transfer stage. I have EDD source code as well if you want to do that, contact me. Michael J. Mahon wrote: > I thought that DISK2FDI produced ordinary 143KB image files, not .nib files. > > I would expect that it couldn't read a copy-protected Apple diskette. > > This limitation, assuming I'm correct, is not a hardware limitation but > a limitation of the software that converts the data read into an image. > There is no reason in principle why it could not also create .nib files > (I just didn't think that it did it yet). > > -michael > > Check out amazing quality sound for 8-bit Apples on my > Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ Hello group, Rubywand wrote in message news:<407BC318.A37C9A1@swbell.net>... > > This limitation, assuming I'm correct, is not a hardware limitation but > > a limitation of the software that converts the data read into an image. > > There is no reason in principle why it could not also create .nib files > > .... > > If we are talking about .nib's of unprotected diskettes, that would be a > nice feature-- i.e. we'd have a simpler way to transfer unprotected diskettes > while preserving Volume Number. > > Handling some protected A2 disks is probably doable, too. The ultimate > upgrade would be an interface which would permit emus to use a PC 5.25" drive > as though it were a Disk II! > I just wanted to remind that the main purpose of Disk2FDI is to make an image of a floppy disk into an FDI file. Disk2FDI, when outputting to the FDI format, is able to image any floppy disk, including any protected disk, including any protected Apple 2 disk (sorry for the long statement ;-) ). What I'd like to see someday is full support of the FDI format within AppleWin and other emulators. That would obviously solve any problem with the Volume Number or copy protections. I would be more than willing to help support the FDI format within Apple emulators. Including .nib support directly within Disk2FDI is pointless because the FDI format can already image anything that a NIB image can contain. Besides, it would be quite easy to create a small program to convert an FDI file to a NIB file. Some useful information (such as part of the copy protection) may be lost in the process, but it could still be useful for programs that do not support the FDI format. Vincent Joguin. Rubywand wrote in message news:<407E2BB4.260B1E96@swbell.net>... > Are details on FDI format available? > Yes, indeed! Here is the PDF version: http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/files/FDISPEC.pdf The Disk2FDI archive also includes a TXT version of the specification. The most interesting part is chapter 6 (the last 2 pages of the PDF) which describes the track images produced by Disk2FDI. Other kinds of track images are currently not produced by Disk2FDI, but allow for smaller file sizes if necessary. Vincent Joguin.