Apple II Disks and Images

There are a half dozen Apple-II disk image formats and several tools for manipulating them. Scavenging the histories is a bit of work in itself leading to parameters that no longer exist and formats that are deprecated or superceded.

A quick run down on common Formats:

• DSK (.dsk, .do, .po). 5.25" DOS 3.3 or Prodos format
  • .dsk could be any disk image but for Apple it’s usually one of .do or .po
  • .do is typically DOS 3.3, usually 16 sectors but occasionally 13 sectors
  • .po is Prodos format.
• HDV. 800k Prodos format.
• NIB. “Nibble Copy” Used for copy protected disks. DOS 3.3 format with extra track and sector info.
• WOZ. An offshoot of the AppleSauce disk controller project, the de facto standard for images of copy-protected disks.

Tools

AppleCommander

https://applecommander.github.io/

• written in Java
• CLI
• GUI native for each platform
• Very complete
  • create/modify disk images (.do, .dsk, .po, .nib, .2mg, .hdv) including gzipped ones
  • add/remove/export files
  • file viewing including some graphics formats and BASIC detokenizing
  • Shrinkit support
• GPL-2.0 License

This has been around for a while. Older documentation and several CC65 threads refer to arguments and parameters that no longer exist, fortunately the change request discussion is public.

CiderPress

http://a2ciderpress.com/

• Windows
• GUI
• Swiss-army tool for files and disks
  • create and manipulate images (.2mg, .dsk, .img, .app. .hdv, .ddd, .po, .do, .raw, .nib) including gzipped
  • disassembler
  • file viewing including common graphics formats, format decoding, BASIC detokenizing
  • hex editor
  • Shrinkit support
• BSD License

DiskM8

https://github.com/paleotronic/diskm8

• written in Go (Linux, OSX, and Windows)
• CLI
• Swiss-army command line tool for Apple disks.
  • create and manipulate ProDOS, DOS 3.x (.dsk, .po, .2mg, .nib)
  • extract and convert binary, text, and detokenize BASIC files
  • disk reports and comparison
• GPL-3.0 License

DSKalyzer

Mentioned in links, archived threads, and odd documentation this one by the same group predated DiskM8. It hasn’t been updated.

DiskBrowser

https://github.com/dmolony/DiskBrowser

• Java
• GUI
• GPL-3.0 License

DiskBrowser is a Java-based GUI for exploring disk images. Unlike the others it doesn’t let you manipulate the images but it does decode their structure and lets you browse sector/block dump or disassembly and to view a number of graphics and data formats. Neat. Much more convenient than using od and hand disassembly.