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The Commodore PET
(Model : CBM 8096) |
Software - Disk Images
Introduction
The majority of PET/CBM software that I have been able to
find on the web is in the form of disk images, the most common
seem to be :-
Technical details of these image files can
be found on the
Emulator File Formats page of the VICE (Versatile
Commodore Emulator) project on
SourceForge.
Disk images are a sector-by-sector copies of
the data from an original disk, they are a convenient method
of copying and storing the contents of complete disks on
non-native hardware for archival purposes. With suitable
hardware, they can be used to generate copies of the
original disk for use in legacy systems, but they are
particularly useful with modern floppy disk replacements,
such as petSD+ and
similar systems, that can store and manipulate many disk
images on a single SD card.
As well as storing the programs or data itself, an image file
also contains all of the low level format data that a disk drive
or host system would expect to find on a physical disk. In that
same way that older versions of Microsoft Windows did not have
native support for ZIP archives, systems hosting disk images can
typically only manipulate the image as a single file. File level
operations such as copying or deleting files requires the use of
a suitable file manager application.
When looking for a suitable tool to work with PET/CBM disk
images under Windows 7, I came across the following selection of
disk image utilities :
As you can see, the D64 format is well supported, the older
CBM/PET image file types seem to be less so. One utility with
good support for the older disk image types is
DIRCBM, an Open
Source project hosted on SourceForge. However, DIRCBM is not a
stand-alone program, it is an add-in for
Total Commander - a
complete File Manager replacement for Microsoft Windows,
it is released as
Shareware,
costing 38 Euro/$44 to register.
Although I have not had time to try it yet, Total Commander
looks very useful in its own right, but also supports plug-ins
to enable additional functions, such as
DIRCBM. Total
Commander with the DIRCBM plug-in looks like a nice solution
that I will try out when (if I ever) I get more time.
In the meantime, I am going to try out
DirMaster and see if
it does the job, if you have any recommendations for something
different, please let me know.
For an overview of access to individual files inside an
image or on an emulated disk, see my
File Access page, but, wherever possible, the use of image
files is preferable.
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