cbmconvert 2.0cbmconvert 2.0 - extract and convert different Commodore binary archivesCopyright © 1996-1998 Marko Mäkelä
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
There are many archiving programs for the Commodore 64, all of
which are incompatible with archiving programs on other systems. This
cbmconvert utility tries to address this problem. It
extracts files from most known file formats and writes them to several
different formats, including some formats used by some Commodore 64
emulators.
This release of cbmconvert does not contain LHARC
support any more, since 1541 disk images (either plain or ZipCoded)
and Lynx archives are much easier to handle. If you need LHARC
support, get the older release, cbmconvert 1.1.
All code has been cleaned up. The file type management in
cbmconvert 2.0 is very flexible, and it is very easy to
add file types later. Currently cbmconvert reads the following file
types: Arkive, Lynx, ARC64/128, PC64, disk images (1541, 1571, 1581,
both native and C128 CP/M format), and raw files. Conversions between
1541 disk images and ZipCoded files can be made with the two supplied
utilities disk2zip and zip2disk.
Compile cbmconvert by entering make. If
you do not have GNU C compiler (gcc) installed on your system, you
will need to edit the Makefile.
The compilation should leave you with three executables:
cbmconvert, zip2disk and
disk2zip. Install these to your binaries directory, and
you are ready to go. Ask your system administrator and/or a local
guru if you do not know where to install the binaries. Or just use
them from the current directory.
cbmconvertAs of version 2.0, cbmconvert consists of three
programs:
Starting with version 2.0, cbmconvert consists of independent file reader and writer modules that are controlled through a main program. There only a command-line interface, but adding an interactive user interface should be easy (any volunteers?).
cbmconvert reads all files in all input files you specify on the command line and writes them in the format you specify. If you want to copy only some files from a set of archive files to an archive file or disk image, you will have to extract all the files to a single-file format such as the PC64 format, and to copy the wanted individual files to the output archive with another invocation of cbmconvert.
You can get a list of cbmconvert options by invoking the program without any arguments. cbmconvert supports following file formats:
Since cbmconvert has been written exclusively with Commodore file
names in mind, the support for CP/M disk images is a bit clumsy. You
may want to rename the files after extracting them from the disks.
For instance, if you have downloaded the CP/M disk images from
http://www.funet.fi/pub/cbm/demodisks/c128/, you can use the following
commands in bash to extract the files from the disk
images:
gunzip *.d64.gz
for i in *.d64; do mkdir ${i%.d64}; cd ${i%.d64}; cbmconvert -c ../$i; cd ..; done
for i in */*.prg; do mv $i "`echo ${i%.prg}|tr A-Z a-z`"; done
CP/M does not store the exact length of the files anywhere. That
is why many CP/M programs create files whose length is a multiple of
128 bytes. Text files in CP/M commonly use ^Z as an end-of-file
delimiter, and many programs fill the extra bytes in the last 128-byte
block of the file with this character. The CP/M routines in
cbmconvert does so as well, and it removes the padding when reading
the files. So, you could use cbmconvert to remove the padding. But
you may prefer the following bash command (requires Perl
5):
for i in *; do perl -i -e 'undef $/; $_=<>; while(/\032$/){chop} print' $i; done
The conversion may lose some file name or attribute information. In some cases, the filenames will be converted from PETSCII to ASCII or vice versa, and some PETSCII or ASCII specific characters will be lost in the conversions. Non-standard directory information available in some formats will be lost as well.
Lynx, Arkive and ARC allow duplicate filenames. But
cbmconvert detects them and refuses to write multiple
files with identical names to archives or to disk images. These
duplicates are often used as directory separators, to separate groups
of filenames. If you really need such separators, use 1-block-long PRG
or SEQ files with different names. For example, the first separator
can be a string of 16 dashes, the second one can be 15 dashes, and so
on.
Arkive also works on illegal filetypes that cannot be created without directly modifying the directory blocks. Such files will be converted to a supported file type. Files with unknown types on disk images will be skipped.
Handling the errors on disk images could be more robust. Not all (typically BAM-related) errors on CBM DOS disk images are detected. For erroneous 1541 disk images that do not work with the new cbmconvert, you may want to try the disk2files program of the previous release.
This program converts a standard 35-track, 683-block 1541 disk image to ZipCode format. Because the ZipCode format stores the disk identifier, this conversion adds information. You can use the -i option to specify the disk identifier.
ZipCoded archives consist of four files prefixed with a number from 1 to 4, and a exclamation point. To extract an archive having the files "1!disk", "2!disk", "3!disk" and "4!disk", command "zip2disk disk". You may then delete the original files with "rm [1-4]\!disk" or similar. But note that some software (demos and copy-protected software) may rely on the disk identifier, which will not be stored in the 1541 disk image file.
Support for ZipCode SixPacks ("1!!disk", "2!!disk", ..., "6!!disk") could be added easily, but this format is used mainly for really custom 1541 disks with abnormal low-level format, for which there doesn't exist any commonly agreed representation format.
The zip2disk module was originally programmed by Paul David Doherty. The ISO 9660 compliant filename truncation algorithm was taken from the T64TOP00 utility created by Wolfgang Lorenz as a part of his now discontinued PC64 emulator.
Support for 1581 CBM DOS disk images was programmed by Pasi Ojala.
The ARC/SDA dissolving code was originally written by Chris Smeets.