More Fun With the Flyer

One of the reasons why I purchased the Retroswitch Flyer modem was for backing up and archiving my collection of floppy disks before they degraded and became unreadable. It's been working out well, in this capacity, but I'm ashamed that I never thought of this use for it until now!

This is a repost from my personal blog, here

You see, not only can the Flyer read and write to .D64 disk images, but it also has the ability to work with .D71 and .D81 disk images. And since the Flyer is about as a near perfect disk drive emulator for the C64 (and C128) as I've had the opportunity to work with, that means that I can use these disk images with my Commodore computers as well.

So, as I was going through my library of floppy disks, copying their contents onto .D64 images with the Flyer, it finally dawned on my that I wasn't taking advantage of what the Flyer had to offer. Why make one disk image for every floppy (as well as side A and B for the double sided disks) in my collection? Why not combine some of the disks together onto the larger .D81 format? I do not have an actual 1581 floppy disk drive, but as I've known all along, the Flyer can emulate a 1581. By doing so, I can save myself a bit of work and wind up with fewer disk images in my archive, as a .D81 has about four and a half times the capacity of a .D64 image.

Thankfully, the Flyer has a command for virtually creating blank disk images for the formats it supports. Once I did this, I just used the standard disk format command on my C128 and it treated the mounted .D81 file as a typical 1581 disk drive and went to work.

From here, I just powered up DraCopy and started copying files from my physical floppy disks, in my 1541 drive, over to the virtual 1581 disk image. It worked like a charm! Now, I have the opportunity to group some floppy disks in my collection together and organize my archive a little better. I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner. The nice thing about doing this on my C128 (rather than my C64) is that I can use DraCopy in 80 column mode, which I like better; And everything still remains compatible with the C64.