A-Max disks?
 

I got an old A-Max (the original dongle kind that plugs into the floppy port). Unfortunately I didn't get the software for it. According to the manual, it came on a weird dual format floppy that had a Mac partition and an Amiga partition. It could be backed up onto normal disks by copying the mac stuff to a mac disk and the Amiga stuff onto an Amiga disk.

Does anyone still have this software?

Yes!! I have this software, manuals.. the whole lot... it`s not adf`d or anything... but I think it`s ready to go with a real Amiga... :) if your interested.. mail or msg me :)

http://www.back2roots.org/News/
 

i saw the software at http://www.back2roots.org/News/ web site

There's no download link though....

Also: this site looked like it might have the software, but ALL of the DMS image files are corrupted....

A-Max disks
 

@Computolio:

The downloads on this site have now been fixed! :)

Hi stainy,
do you still have manuals and/or other material?
Would you share/scan them?
I have some disks in A-Max format which I would like to upload.

Hi Supamax,

Have a look at the site linked to by Computolio above. There's a lot more there besides the fixed DMS image files (like manuals, etc.) :)

prowler

BTW, please upload any disk images you may have. I'd be very interested in them. Thanks.

@ prowler

Hi mate!

Thanks, I saw that site before :). It would be nice to find some scans (.ipg or .pdf) of the original manuals. I found some in the Magix FTP, although the resolutions is very low :(.

About the A-Max disks, I have 4-5 of them but I have to find out how to dump them with Powercopy.
On Powercopy manual I read that the Sector nibble mode can copy them. I tried but with no success. I'll try again with different settings.

Do you know if someone made some extended .adf's of A-Max disks before?

EDIT: I didn't try with RAWREAD yet. I prefer to make a "cleaner" dump with Powercopy, if possible ;)

Hi Supamax,

I'm sure that the Registered version of Disk2FDI would be able to copy these disks. They're not true 800k Macintosh-formatted disks, because they're not GCR encoded. AFAIK, the A-Max cartridge allows reading of Macintosh GCR encoded disks, but will both read and write A-Max hybrid format disks. However, I don't think that these disks can be read in the Amiga's floppy drive. So I'm not sure if Powercopy will work.

If Disk2FDI can copy them, I don't know what type or size of image would be produced,

prowler

PS. In fact, these are the first A-Max formatted disks I have ever heard of anyone owning.

Yes, they can! I used them many times, and I can use them right now with A-Max (of course the cracked version, and without any additional hardware) :cool

They have a particular sector format, but I can't figure out (yet) how to copy them.
By the way: I can make a copy of an A-MAX-formatted disk under A-Max.
I mean, under A-Max I can format another A-Max disk and copy from the source to the destination. Or use (if I had it) a Mac DOS copier from one disk to another.
But the destination disk is A-Max, too :(.

He he, I imagined it :D

Hi prowler,

as I wrote to you, many days ago I successfully dumped (*) 3 A-Max floppies (I will explain how. I used CrossMac and Powercopy). I have one more which is a real pain to transfer, and one which is ruined.

I would really need something: is there somewhere a simple utility (the simplest possible, with disk output and not RAM output) for 800KB floppy dumping on the Mac? One of the earlier versions of Disk Copy, for example (pre-v4.2). Normal DOS-dumping, I mean.
Something like TransADF, but for Mac.

Someone with good Mac knowledge knows it? Akira?

(*) on .adf (extended adf)

Hi Supamax,

Are the A-Max-formatted 800k floppies readable at all on a Mac? If a Mac can read them, I don't see why they can't be imaged with Disk Copy.

I have had no trouble making images of Mac-formatted 800k floppies on my PCI Mac with any version of Disk Copy I have tried.

Unfortunately I don't have any A-Max-formatted disks myself, nor have I been able to find any images of them.

Perhaps the images you have created on your Amiga could be written to floppies on a Mac using Drive Copy. I have been successful in writing images of Apple Lisa floppies to disk, even when the Mac doesn't understand the filesystem and can't mount the images or the disks after completing the copy.

The only information I have been able to find regarding the copying of A-Max-formatted floppies on an Amiga is that they can be successfully copied with X-Copy or other program with Indexnibble.

prowler

No, the problem is not related to reading them on a Mac. I can read them correctly on my A600 (they are A-Max formatted). The problem is related to dumping them.

I would dump them easily/easier (under A-Max) if I only had Disk Copy :p.
I tried Disk Copy 4.2 but it doesn't run on my A600. It requires 1.4MB RAM to allocate space for floppy dumping, but I only have a basic A600.

I suppose/hope that Disk Copy versions pre-4.2 (1.0? 2.0?) will work on my Amiga, because they were included with Mac Plus' OS (and mac Plus had a small amount of RAM).

Could you extract the (old, the oldest you have!) Disk Copy executable from the System disk and upload it?

I searched for a freeware Mac dumping utility but I didn't find a single one... only HD-dumping utilities :banghead

Hi Supamax,

Go to this site:
http://homepage.mac.com/chinesemac/e...sk_images.html
and download the System 3.2 Finder 5.3 (June 1986) System Tools disk images and the System 4.1 Finder 5.5 (April 1987) System Tools and Utilities disk images.

One of these disk images should contain the vesion of Disk Copy that you're after.

If you haven't got the means to extract the files from these images, I can do it for you, but not tonight.

prowler

PS. Let me know if you'd like me to do it tomorrow.

@Supamax: in the control-panel "Memory" there is an option to enable "virtual memory". have you tried this?

@ prowler,

thanks for the link my friend :), I knew it but couldn't extract anything on my PC (I don't have a Mac). I searched for some Windows utility able to extract files from a Mac image but nothing... :sad

So YES, I would appreciate very much if you could extract Disk Copy for me!! :agree

Also, it would be interesting if you knew any Windows utility which could do it...

@ hit

Hi hit, do you mean in the A-Max control panel? If so, I didn't notice it... Could I really create some virtual memory by using hard disk space? This is not mentioned in the A-Max manual...
EDIT: if you mean A-Max IV, I cannot use it on my A600

Hi Supamax,

Try TransMac v8.2:
http://www.asy.com/sharetm.htm

Another utility is MacDrive 7.2.6:
http://new.mediafour.com/support/macdrive/

And another is Gemulator Explorer:
http://www.emulators.com/freefile/gemxplor.zip

They're great for extracting files from Macintosh disk images, but watch that you preserve the data and resource forks.

In the meantime, I will see what the oldest version of Disk Copy is that I can extract from the Macintosh System and Utility disk images I have that can handle 800k HFS disks, and I will upload it for you tomorrow if you still need it by then.

prowler

@ prowler,

WOOOW, Gemulator Explorer specs looks really great! I'm trying it ASAP (and let you know) :crazy Thanks a lot!
I didn't try MacDrive; I tried TransMac before, but it only works for HD (High Density, I mean) diskettes/images.

EDIT: in case it could be useful, this is another nice site which I found when searching for the dump utility:
http://nbbemulation.free.fr/forum_macintosh/index.php
EDIT2: http://rolli.ch/MacPlus/

Hi Supamax,

If you have successfully imaged A-Max-formatted floppies on an Amiga using CrossMac and Powercopy, can you restore these images back to floppy using the same utilities?

If you can, then perhaps you could upload the images and the tools required, so that I could restore them on my Amiga. Then I could test them with the registered version of Disk2FDI to see if it can dump them. This could very well be the dumping utility you require, only it's not freeware, unfortunately. Personally, I think it's been well worth the registration fee I paid for my version, considering what it's capable of.

That website is actually a very good Macintosh resource. I first came across it about five months ago.

That one as well, only I found that one much earlier.

prowler

Hi again prowler,

Yes, of course. Powercopy will suffice (CrossMac was only needed to obtain a better copy, on fresh disks, of my "weak" floppies), but:
a) Powercopy is not easy to use
b) it's not cracked yet; I'm using an AR3 (Action replay 3) dump of Powercopy made by Boo Boo. He made some dumps for different machines (A600, A1200, etc.), so you could ask him an A1200 "release"
c) it would be *much* better with a native Mac floppy dumping utility. With such utility you could - under A-Max - recreate a floppy from the image. An image dumped by you or downloaded from the Web.

Of course, I will upload the images, no problem.
Regarding DISK2FDI, the last free version (0.9) couldn't dump them (I tried), but perhaps the new registered version can... however, once you have a .fdi image, can you dump it back to a real floppy?