I have a couple of original floppies that I'd like to take a backup of. These games and programs are getting old and I don't want end up with bad disks that is unusable. Some of the games include Turrican II, Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasies, Civilization, Deluxe Paint III and Workbench.
There is this issue about copy protection. If I understand it correctly, an Amiga disk can contain up to 80 tracks(cylinders?). The internal drive is capable of writing 80 tracks but can read up 82 tracks. It was common for game disks to place data on track 81 and 82 where it was hard for disk copier to create and exact copy. Is this correct?
I figure out that the best way to do the backup is to get an external disk drive for my A500 and use X-Copy. X-Copy seems to have been released into the public domain which is good. I've seen a dongle that can be used with an external drive when running X-Copy. I have seen schematics for this dongle and if this is needed for copying I can make my own.
Another solution would be to create disk images and transfer them to the PC for storage. However, I do not know how to create disk images or how to write them back to disk. Or if this would work on copy protected games.
Ok, that was a bit of background and what I have been able to find out so far. To sum it up, these are the questions I have:
1. What does this dongle do and is this needed for copying?
2. What version of X-Copy should I use and does this version support the dongle?
3. Will X-Copy 'defeat' the copy protection so I actually will have a perfect backup of my floppies?
4. Is there any good floppy images program that can be used to create backups on copy protected games that can later be written back to floppies?
Thank you for your help.
