Read, write or convert from an Atari 815 Double Disk Drive#
One of the major spin-offs from the The Atari Accountant
, thanks to Curt Vendel, is, that we now have the knowledge and technology to read, write and convert data from an Atari 815 Double Disk Drive.
Ryan Goolevitch and Joachim Baßmann had the same idea at the same time independently from each other. Here it is:
The Atari 815 Double Disk Drive is capable of dealing with single sided diskettes in true DD format, only. Therefore, going back to 1981 and earlier, the user was not able to change disks with the Atari 810 Single Disk Drive. But nowadays we have drives capable of reading DD diskettes and even double sided! Therefore, we can get at least the data from the 815 with a sector copy program. An Atari 1050 disk drive with Happy, US Doubler, Speedy etc. can do this job without any problem.
However, the 815 encoded the bits on the disks binary inverted, compared to every other double density Atari compatible disk drive, so even though you can hopefully sector copy each 180 KB side. The next step is to XOR every data bit in the resulting ATR image to get a usable disk. Bingo, that is all! :-)
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