Apple II Disks and Images
Dec 29, 2019There 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the histories is a bit of work in itself leading to parameters that no longer exist and formats that are deprecated or superceded.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
- 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.