I have been a loyal Atari person for ages, maybe too long but I have used many of the Atari products as well as all the software made to make back up copies of software. I love my APE interface and use it a lot, in backing up my collection as well being sure I have many copies of programs I use all the time. I am a MAXFLASH uaser as well, and love that end as well.

What are the differences between DISKCOMM3 and the APE?

I know DISKCOMM3 makes a copy(maybe a sector copy) of your software and reports errors, while APE does the same but tells you what the "ERROR IS" (nice touch) But the DISKCOMM file is only used by your ATARI to another disk, while APE makes the copy to your computer. (luckly enough I have a spare Windows 98se machine to do the rest) But is there any other differences?

Interesting question -- I haven't actually used Bob Puff's Disk Communicator in years. DISKCOM3 was one of a series of disk to file utilities whose purpose was to allow sending a disk (image) via modem. It was probably the last and arguably the best of the group that included SCRUNCH (the first that I know of), SHRINK, SQUISH, CRUSHER, and MASHER. DISCOMM also did some slight compression, but I believe it was limited to "compressing" empty sectors. DISCOMM was intended for floppies up to 1 MB in size. (Remember that 1 MB was a BIG file to be sent via modem when these utilities were written.)

ATR's had a little different intended purpose -- to support the SIO2PC system. "Proper" ATR images never use compression. They *can be* made into compressed ATR's, but that sometimes causes problems for the user. They are real disk images up to 16 MB (maybe more), and have an attached group of index bytes (16, I think) that provide relevant info about the disk image. Since APE can use ATR, DCM, and XFD images there is no real need to convert DISKCOMM images, but several utilities including Atarimax's IMAGIC allow conversions.

Here's a website that has more info about DISKCOMM:
http://home.planet.nl/~ernest/atarixle.html

-Larry

Thank you for you comments and again I like using the APE SYSTEM over other older well know and loved programs in my collection.
One last question: Sure you have APE Images all over the place, how would you make a paper copy or them? I would like to have my collection on paper so I can weed out duplicates and all sorts of odd files that mean nothing to me.

jim

from the command prompt:

TREE /F >PAPER.TXT