Atari floppy disk preservation and backup

Jean Louis-Guérin has an excellent site, info-coach.fr/atari, dedicated to Atari computers. Among the detailed information presented is a thorough discussion of copy protection schemes on Atari floppy disks.

Like on many hardware systems of the time, there were multiple ways to write data such that the normal operating system would not be able to reproduce a disk. Methods included many low-level drive controller techniques to make non-standard areas of the disk which the normal operating system couldn’t interpret.

Jean writes about the various schemes used and software that can now decode and copy the data for preservation.

You can read all about it on Jean’s site here and document here (PDF).

Image credit: Felix Winkelnkemper – Wikipedia Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license


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