New version of altairdsk available

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi All,

A few years ago, I released a command line utility to read, write and format Altair CP/M formatted floppy and hard disk images. It's similar to cpmtools except that it actually works with Altair floppy disks and their weird 137 byte sectors.

I've re-written this tool in the Zig programming language and as a bonus, a graphical user interface is now included. If you'd like to try it out the source code, build instructions etc are available under the "experimental" branch at https://github.com/phatchman/altair_tools. If you just want the binaries, you can grab those from https://github.com/phatchman/altair_tools/releases.

The release has binaries for most operating systems and architectures, but I can only provide GUI binaries for Windows and Linux x86_64 right now. The GUI should build for any architecture that supports SDL2. It should build fine for MacOS and I'd be interested if anyone gets it running on one. Please send me a screen-shot and let me know how it went.

The GUI needs a little more polishing, but I've been using it regularly without many issues. Just keep in mind, this is a "beta" release, so make sure you backup anything important before you use this. Happy to hear issues or suggestions either here or on github.

Cheers,

Paul.

[John Galt]

awesome 

[John Galt]

my anti-virus software keeps shutting it down.

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi John,

That's no good. 

What sort of error do you see? Are you seeing something like "Windows protected your PC.... Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognized app from starting...". Or something similar for whatever virus scanner you run?

If so, that message is shown whenever you are about to run an unsigned application that you downloaded from the internet, which is generally a bad thing to do. There are two solutions to this:

1) Click on the More Info and then click "Run Anyway" (If you are running Windows Defender, there is probably something similar for other virus scanners)

2) After you extract the adgui.exe, right click on the file. Select properties. Near the bottom of the properties window, you will see "Security" and a checkbox that says "Unblock". Check Unblock and click OK.

If you are seeing something else, let me know what it is and hopefully I can help. 

Cheers,

Paul.

[John Galt]

Norton seems to shut it down no matter what i try. 

i tried running it in a sandbox the window would open for a nanosecond then it closes.  tried to run it from windows 10 to windows 7.

keeps getting shutdown.

the command line version works.

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi John,

How frustrating! I've tested it under a Windows 11 sandbox and a Windows 10 VM, and both worked OK for me. The only think I can think of is that I attach a console to the gui process for debug purposes, which maybe Norton doesn't like? 

I've added a debug version with the console attaching code removed as adgui-debug.zip. This may give more information if it is actually crashing vs being killed. But with the console detached, it might not print anything. If you'd like to keep trying to get it working, please download that debug version and see if Norton likes that any better.

Also, please try launching adgui.exe from a command / powershell prompt if you haven't already tried that.

If all else fails, I can walk you through building it from source. I don't know if that would make any difference, but it is the only other thing I can think of right now.

Best of luck,

Paul.

[villa...@gmail.com]

Many thanks for this Paul

I'm running windows 10 and your latest altairdsk works fine but I'm having trouble with the gui.

e.g Illegal instruction at address 0x7ff60c148d89
Unable to dump stack trace: debug info stripped

What is the syntax to use this ?

Tx Colin

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi Colin,

I think I know the issue. I've built a new version and put it in the release. Download adgui.zip again to get the new version. This has debugging info included, so if it still happens with this build, I'll have more information on why.

Cheers,

Paul.

[villa...@gmail.com]

Perfect!!!  Many thanks Paul, looks a great enhancement, will have a play with it now !

Colin

[Paul Hatchman]

It should be fairly straight forward, but just in case, I've just created some usage instructions here:  altair_tools/docs/ADGUI.md at experimental · phatchman/altair_tools

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi John,

You may have been having the same issue as Colin. I did not realise that the I'd built the exe to make use of some more modern CPU instructions. Zig is still very new to me. 

If you're willing to give it another try, please download the new adgui.zip file and let me know. I don't think it is worth running that debug file I asked you to run as it will have the same issue with using the newer CPU instructions.

[John Galt]

downloaded the new version.

Interestingly, windows refuses to allow me to run it smartscreen comes up and refuses to be disabled even when i go into services.

i tried changing security settings and my desktop refuses to allow me to run the gui version.

I've never seen smartscreen act like this.

[Tom Wilson]

For me, it just opens a blank window and closes after a few seconds.

Is there maybe a runtime library or something that needs to be included?

Basic system info:

Windows 11 24H2 

Intel i7 12700K

96GB RAM

GeForce RTX 3080Ti

Tom Wilson
wils...@gmail.com
+1(619)940-6311 

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[Paul Hatchman]

Hi Tom,

Can you please try launching adgui.exe from a command prompt or powershell window? It should hopefully display some error information to the console window that will tell us why it is closing down. At minimum it should display a message about the display DPI on startup before it does anything else.

I've double-checked the dependencies and can confirm that it only depends on various windows system dlls (it looks like it needs Windows 10+). Everything else is statically linked. 

[Tom Wilson]

It doesn't print anything to the console. The new window opens, and it drops right back to the command prompt.

Tom Wilson
wils...@gmail.com
+1(619)940-6311 

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[Paul Hatchman]

Hi Tom,

I've found a Windows 10 machine I can recreate this on. Hopefully have some news for you "soon".

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi Tom,

I still don't really understand the issue, but I think I now have a version that works under a fresh Windows 10 install. But weirdly the Windows 10 version doesn't run correctly under Windows 11. I'll keep separate versions until I figure it out.

Please try the version in adgui_win10.zip and see if that works for you. 

Maybe this one will sneak through John's Smart Screen?

Regards,

Paul

[Paul Hatchman]

Awesome! I'm glad you got it working and I appreciate your perseverance.

I just learned that Zig does have a Win 7 built target, so I've build a 32 bit and 64 bit win 7 versions and uploaded it to the release. Let me know if they work on your laptop.

On Tuesday, April 15, 2025 at 10:57:23 AM UTC+10 John Galt wrote:

ok "adgui_win10" works on my system

Norton antivirus through a fit. 

I had to force it to load.

the GUI is opened now 
I transferred a few files from an DSK image to my desktop.

On Monday, April 14, 2025 at 10:42:12 AM UTC-4 John Galt wrote:

i'll give this a try tonight.

i tried disabling smartscan and a few other safeties to try and get the program to run nothing worked. i've seen windows defender come down hard before, this the first time I've seen it this locked out from running a program at least on my system.

would this program run under windows 7? i have an old laptop where this might be better since its portable.

[Tom Wilson]

The good news is that the GUI does come up with this version.

The bad news... both this and the command line version seem completely unable to handle the 330K disk images I've got. 

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi Tom,

Some questions:

1) Did the old version support this format?

2) Did you get any error messages from the command line tool? Or is it just showing the wrong data?

3) What's the exact size of the image file in bytes?
4) Can share one of the disk images with me? That would be the quickest way for me to work out what is going on.

Thanks,

Paul.

[Tom Lake]

It runs fine in Win 11 but I have to run it from the command line. How do you get the GUI to load?

On Saturday, April 12, 2025 at 12:03:04 PM UTC-4 phat...@gmail.com wrote:

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi Tom,

Not sure if this is your issue, but just in case: 

There are two separate applications, the command line tool altairdsk.exe and the GUI which is adgui.exe.

On Windows 11, you should be fine to use the adgui.exe file from adgui.zip in the release page. Just extract that zip file to somewhere and run adgui.exe from the windows explorer as you would any other windows application. Or you can just run adgui.exe from a command prompt in the directory you extracted it to if you are having issues.

If you are having issue running the adgui.exe application itself, then try the one from adgui_win10.zip. People seem to have had more luck getting that one running.

Cheers,

Paul.

[John Galt]

already came in handy i needed to drop a file on a 1024 HD image and worked perfectly.

On Tuesday, April 15, 2025 at 8:36:59 PM UTC-4 John Galt wrote:

i tested with a 330kb disk image, and i had no issues reading from the disk a file, coping the file from the disk to my desktop, and placing a file from my desktop to the disk image.

On Tuesday, April 15, 2025 at 10:59:14 AM UTC-4 John Galt wrote:

will report back on the windows 7 laptop i have to pull it out of mothballs.

I  didn't play around with 330kb images, i'll try that tonight on my win 10 desktop

[Tom Wilson]

I figured it out: The files are 337,664 bytes long, which is not consistent with your detection routine. 

Your detection routine appears to use the file length and looks for 337,568 bytes. The problem with that is when you transfer a file with XMODEM, the file will always be a multiple of 128 bytes, or 337,664 in this case. 

Right now, your detection routine uses a simple switch statement to detect the files based on the file size. A method of handling files rounded up to 128-byte blocks is necessary. 

Looking at the C code, It looks like you're trying to handle that in the disk_detect_type routine, with the mits_alt_length variable, but if you re-wrote this in another language, is it possible that the math is rounding incorrectly? I'd explictly define mits_alt_length  as a constant and forget trying to be fancy and round to multiples of 128. It's not like the 8 inch image format is going to change, after 50 years. =)

[Tom Wilson]

It looks like the Zig code does not have the special case. I am not familiar with Zig, but it looks like the Zig code uses an iterate and test pattern to check the file size against the specs, rather than the switch statement the c code uses. 

While this is more elegant and maintainable, the special case for the 8 inch floppy got lost. Since that’s one special, well known case, either create a second case for the 337,664 size or fudge the file_size variable down to 337,568 in the test routine. 

Tom Wilson
wils...@gmail.com
+1(619)940-6311 

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 7:25 AM John Galt <furba...@gmail.com> wrote:

should there be detection for both, you have the 330kb files with 337,568 and you have the xmodem transferred images of 337,664. both are correct just one has the extra bytes attached.

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[Paul Hatchman]

Hi Tom,

It does have the check in isCorrectFormat() in disk_types.zig. But I had the divide and multiply for the rounding reversed. I agree it would have been easier just to put the size in there, but the generic code is a 1 liner, so it's a bit of a wash.

I've pushed the change to github. I'll push the new gui versions once I've had a chance to get the multi-architecture build process in better shape.

If you are feeling adventurous, take a look at the build instructions README.md on the experimental branch. It really is as simple as downloading zig, cloing the repo and then doing zig build. All of the dependencies are automatically fetched and built. It's a really nice feature of Zig compared to the cmake / autoconf nightmare that is required for cross-platform C applications these days.

Cheers,

Paul

[Walt Perko]

Hi, 

Although the program is handy for those editing tasks ... 

I'm wondering if the program could open up and had a "SELECT ALL & COPY" button so we can paste the list of names into another document or spreadsheet etc.  

The program doesn't seem to let me open any of my Altair 8800 .DSK files ???  Help - About doesn't provide a version number yet.  This is the "latest" as of today's downloads.  

.

[Tom Wilson]

Read the entire email chain.  It’s a known bug. 

Also, consider using the command line version for getting a printable listing. You can redirect that to a file. 

Tom Wilson
wils...@gmail.com
+1(619)940-6311 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/altair-duino/a15e9533-2d55-48ea-8747-b3c793a4f72en%40googlegroups.com.

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi Walt,

Yes, currently it's on the "experimental" branch/release because it still needs some more testing and polishing. I'm not able to work on it at the moment, but I will look into adding the copy/paste for the filenames, and of course, fixing any remaining issues.

If you do find any other issues, or have other suggestions, please let me know. I'll make an announcement here once the "1.0" release is out.

Best,

Paul.

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi All,

It's been a little while, but a new version is now available. This has fixes for all the bugs I know about, hopefully better compatibility across different types of windows operating systems and ctrl-c copy for filenames. Oh! And not to forget a working "About" box ;)

Release 0.9.5 - Pre-release · phatchman/altair_tools

If you'd prefer to build from source, then use the experimental branch from github. Build from source is relatively trivial. It literally is just:

1) Install Zig from ziglang.org

2) Clone the git repo

3) zig build

If no one finds any issues with this in the next week or so, I'll ship it as 1.0.

Next on the agenda is to look into supporting CDOS and Altair Basic disks. (no promises....)

If there are any other Altair 8800 compatible image formats people would like supported, let me know and happy to look into it.

Cheers,

Paul.

[John Galt]

awesome, will take a look.

[Walt Perko]

Hi, 

I downloaded the altair_tools_0_9_5.zip file ... ran the adgui.exe and expanded the view hoping to shrink some of the columns so I could see all the columns in the display.  I cannot grab 

Still no COPY button to grab all the data to post to an .XLS or .TXT file ... 

.

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi Walt,

The GUI toolkit I'm using doesn't have an actual grid widget, so the whole scrollable grid is hand-crafted. I'd have to code all of that logic for resizing columns etc and for the filename lengths and sizes that we typically deal with on CPM, I don't think it is going to be worth the effort to do it. Also, the file sizes shown on the windows grid are currently limited to < 10MB, just like on the Altair side. So, even expanding the width of the columns won't make it show the actual size. This is one of those features where I didn't think it was worth implementing as there's no disk format that can accommodate files of that size, so they may as well be "inifinity" in size from the Altair's point of view.

But if there is some use case I'm missing where you think this would be useful, let me know. 

For copy, that can only be accessed via ctrl-c. There is no button for it. It should pop up a dialog to let you know the copy worked.

Best,

Paul

[Walt Perko]

Hi, 

I wanted to make some columns narrower so that the far right columns looked like they were at full width.  Right now they look cut-off on the right side of the display, even when I goto full screen size in Windows.  

.

[Walt Perko]

Hi, 

I forgot to mention, I'm still looking for a button to copy the whole list of files so I can paste them into a text file or even better they'd be comma separated so I could past them into an Excel spreadsheet.  

.

On Thursday, June 5, 2025 at 5:11:44 PM UTC-7 phat...@gmail.com wrote:

[Paul Hatchman]

What doesn't work for you? Did you also want the other details about the file? 

I couldn't work out what was best.

1) Just filenames

2) All the details tab-delimited so can be pasted into excel etc.

3) Provide a full text directory listing, similar to what the command-line version would provide.

There's multiple files because there's multiple users. Though I did find a min bug, that it doesn't filter based the the current user you are viewing.

[Paul Hatchman]

Should have mentioned that is with Ctrl-C. 

I'll put in better Mac bindings in the next version so it will be cmd-c on Mac in future.

[Walt Perko]

Hi, 

I think getting the file name, the file extension and the file size would be the most useful.  IF the list can be dumped into an Excel file then this makes it easy to find a .DSK when looking for a specific program.  

.

[Paul Hatchman]

OK I'll include that in the next update. I can add it to the "File" menu as well.

[Walt Perko]

Hi, 

IF each column can be comma or tab separated that would be even more useful.    Name ... Extension ... Size  

.

[Paul Hatchman]

Hi,

I'll be releasing a new version of the GUI and CLI soon. I tried using tab separated output for the clipboard, but things didn't line up well. So, I've basically just created a clone of what the cli tool produces. i.e:
Name     Ext   Length Used U At
BASIC    COM   19456B  19K 0 W
CDOS     COM   13696B  14K 0 W
CDOSGEN  COM   49664B  49K 0 W
EDIT     COM    7168B   7K 0 W
INIT271  COM   11264B  11K 0 W
INIT282  COM   12032B  12K 0 W
RDOS     COM    4352B   5K 0 W
STAT     COM    9216B   9K 0 W
WM       HLP    2944B   3K 0 W
WRTSYS   COM    1152B   2K 0 W
XFER     COM    7552B   8K 0 W

If I do it with tabs, it's better for the spreadsheets, but visually it looks much worse.
Name Ext Length Used U At
BASIC COM 19456B 19K 0 W
CDOS COM 13696B 14K 0 W
CDOSGEN COM 49664B 49K 0 W
EDIT COM 7168B 7K 0 W
INIT271 COM 11264B 11K 0 W
INIT282 COM 12032B 12K 0 W
RDOS COM 4352B 5K 0 W
STAT COM 9216B 9K 0 W
WM HLP 2944B 3K 0 W
WRTSYS COM 1152B 2K 0 W
XFER COM 7552B 8K 0 W

This also previews a new feature, which is the ability to open CDOS images.

Let me know if you have any preference on the clipboard functionality. I could add an option, but I also want to keep things simple.

Best,

Paul.

[John Galt]

thanks again for this tool :)

[Walt Perko]

Hi, 

Is there a new version that works with more .DSK formats?  

Some of my .dsk's will not open in the program, but those .dsk's work just fine on my Altair 8800 computers ... 

.

[Walt Perko]

Hi, 

I got the altairdsk.exe from the Legacy/Windows folder, but it opens and closes in an instant on my Windows 11 PC.  

https://github.com/phatchman/altair_tools  

The older adgui.exe runs on my Windows 11 PC, but cannot read many .dsk files.  

.

[Paul Hatchman]

That version, or anything called altairdsk.exe, is a command line application. Sou need to run it from a command or powershell prompt.

PS C:\src\altair_tools\legacy\windows> .\altairdsk.exe -h
altairdsk.exe: -[d|r|F]v  [-T <type>] [-u <user>] <disk_image>
altairdsk.exe: -[g|p|e][t|b]v [-T <type>] [-u <user>] <disk_image> <src_filename> [dst_filename]
altairdsk.exe: -[G|P|E][t|b]v [-T <type>] [-u <user>] <disk_image> <filename ...>
altairdsk.exe: -[x|s]v        [-T <type>] <disk_image> <system_image>
altairdsk.exe: -h

All versions should handle all Altair CPM disk formats. This excludes:

1) CDOS disks - CDISKnn.DSK

2) Altair DOS / Altair Basic disks - DISK02.DSK - DISK04.DSK and DISK09-DISK0F.

When the new release drops, it will add support for the CDOS disk images, which will let you open 3 more images that ship with the Altair Duino.

As for the Altair DOS and Basic images. These use a very different file system to the CPM and CDOS images. I will get to these at some point, but sadly there is no easy path to getting support for them. Pretty much nothing of the existing logic can be re-used for those disks.

But if you have an image outside of those that does not load, please feel free to raise an issue here or on the project github and I'll get it sorted.

Best,

Paul.

[Walt Perko]

Hi,  

I can't load these .DSK files ... 

I like the program that I can look at the files on the .DSK ... makes life much easier ... but these 329KByte .dsk don't load.  

.

[Paul Hatchman]

Umm. Both of those work for me in both the GUI and the command line. I did rename the files though because one starts with a dash/minus and the other has a space and dash in it, which are hard to pass correctly on the command line.

Below I'm just doing a directory listing, then getting the WELCOME file and then showing the first 5 lines, just to confirm it copied correctly.

PS C:\src\altair_tools> .\zig-out\bin\altairdsk.exe .\BASCOM.dsk                                  

Name     Ext   Length Used U At

BULLETIN        1408B   2K 1 W
FIRSTIME        2432B   4K 1 W
NEXT             128B   2K 1 W
PASSWORD         384B   2K 1 W
SUMMARY          256B   2K 1 W
WELCOME         1664B   2K 1 W
6 file(s), occupying 14K of 296K total capacity
6 directory entries and 282K bytes remain
PS C:\src\altair_tools> .\zig-out\bin\altairdsk.exe .\BASCOM.dsk -g WELCOME
PS C:\src\altair_tools> Get-Content -Head 5 .\WELCOME                                                

  TERMINAL NEED NULLS? TYPE CTL-N WHILE THIS TYPES:

      ***   WELCOME TO CBBS/LAS VEGAS   ***
  *** WALT'S COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM ***



If there are any particular errors you are getting, let me know and I can try and help with those.

[Gwen Patton]

I wonder if the version of CP/M for the NEC PC-8001 mkII would be compatible? I had one of those back in the 80's, that I got from the company I worked for when they cleaned out their storeroom. They had a couple of these, some Commodore PETs, and other interesting looking machines. But we had an engineer who had a part in working on their version of CP/M, which had, among other things, a 62KB TPA. The last  2k was their BDOS. Here's what some Googlewhacking returned:

"The NEC PC-8001 mkII features 64 KB of RAM and a 4 MHz Z80-compatible CPU. When running the standard CP/M operating system, the TPA (Transient Program Area)—the contiguous memory available for user programs and the Console Command Processor (CCP)—is typically 62 KB.The remaining 2 KB of RAM is reserved for the system's Basic Disk Operating System (BDOS) or workspace."

It was a great machine. Dual 5" floppy drives, reasonably fast speed for the time, and a pile of software. I bought Turbo Pascal for it, and it came with WordStar and a spreadsheet whose name escapes me that was NOT Lotus 1-2-3. It also had a version of dBase II that worked reasonably well. I did a lot of good work on that box, VERY worthwhile, considering I paid a whole whopping $50 for it. My friend the engineer made sure I had as complete a library for it as possible. One site claims it didn't have a lot of software, but I was happy enough. I wasn't big on games back then, which was the chief lack. But this version wasn't the one with the advanced features that made it better at games, the PC-8001 SR.

I don't know if there's an archive of its CP/M anywhere accessible, but it would be a great version to port, whether to the Altair-Duino or to some other retro box, like the Elite 80180 based machine I got on Tindie.

https://necretro.org/PC-8001_mkII

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-8000_series

https://vintagecpu.wordpress.com/nec-pc-8001-mkii/

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

73,

Gwen, NG3P

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[Walt Perko]

Hi,  

It didn't occur to me that the program couldn't load any filename.dsk ... that seems a little odd, but not a serious problem.  

.