AltairClone.com

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.

Very cool, thanks!

Thanks for a great tool! I use it often on the Mac, and it works quite well!

@Mike, do you have any detailed documentation on the format of Altair Basic/DOS disks? I wonder what it would take to add support for those disks to this tool.

You can find information about the disk layout used for Altair BASIC (same for Altair DOS) in Appendix H of the BASIC manual (pdf page 120).

https://deramp.com/downloads/altair/sof ... 0(4.1).pdf

Mike

This version includes a number of fixes. I would recommend anyone on the old version to upgrade to this one.
https://github.com/phatchman/altair_too ... /tag/0.9.5

I'm happy to report that I have successfully built and run the latest version on the macOS Tahoe developer release. Thanks!