I’ve been continuing to clean up old documents, backup, and take the time to sort these out. Unsurprisingly, after 40 years of working with, programming and running various computer/software-related businesses, I would gather so much stuff.
I’m slowly putting it all together, deleting things that are of anymore and making sure that I capture and detail via these blog items of interest to me or maybe others can stumble across them.
Today, this blog entry relates to a small utility I wrote 20 years ago. In 2002, I wrote a little program that allowed for easy access to Commodore DOS commands; that was nothing new as these types of utilities have been created since Commodore computers came to be.
Screenshot version 1.01 (2002)
The difference with this utility was that it was specifically write to be used with Nick Copland’s fantastic application which turned an old DOS PC into a working hard drive for the Commodore 64.
The program was call HDD-Tools and v2.0 was published for free in 2002. The application gave the user who was using Nick’s software access to the following commands.
All normal Commodore DOS command –
- Scratch (delete files)
- Rename
- Initialise
- Validate
- Copy
Plus these HDD supported commands –
- Directory View
- Set Time
- Set Date
- Blocks Free
- Switch Short / Long filenames
- Report Protocol Speed
- Create DOS Directory
- Remove DOS Directory
- Create C64 disk image (D64) with you were using the Professional Version of HDD
At the time I released the application as a downloadable (D64) image but I also worked on a cartridge (ROM) release. This release was made; well it went as far as being written and burnt onto a ROM but ultimately never finished. I may still find the source code for this while cleaning up and if I do I’ll release here.
Screenshot for version 2.00