[Coco] Disk Conversion for Carey

[Andrew]

Carey (plus anyone else interested):

I wanted to let you know that this weekend I pulled out the ol' 
floppies, dusted them off (j/k - they have been carefully stored since I 
last touched them oh-so-many moons ago), and started back up with the 
conversion project.

Just so you know where things stand, you had sent me 293 floppies, of 
which around 280 or so were CoCo-related (there were a few PC floppies 
in there, nothing of importance IIRC).

Of the CoCo-related floppies, around 200 were of RSDOS format, and 
around 60 were OS-9 format.

I am working the project in several stages, of which I am currently only 
on the third step:

1. Sort and organize floppies into RSDOS and OS-9 "piles".

RSDOS floppies:

2. First-pass on RSDOS floppies (RETRIEVE to .DSK files).
3. Second-pass on RSDOS floppies (RETRIEVE+"magic" to .DSK files).
4. Final-pass on RSDOS floppies ("magic" to .DSK files).

OS-9 floppies:

5. First-pass on OS-9 floppies (RETRIEVE to .DSK files).
6. Second-pass on OS-9 floppies (RETRIEVE+"magic" to .DSK files).
7. Final-pass on OS-9 floppies ("magic" to .DSK files).

8. Scanning of disks, envelopes, documentation.

---

I have the floppies sorted, and I completed my initial pass on the 
floppies and began the second pass earlier. This weekend I continued on 
with the second pass. The first pass is done using just my emulator box 
  (running DOS and both DK's and JV's emulators) and RETRIEVE. This has 
managed to get about 80 percent or so of the RS-DOS floppies converted. 
Of the remainder, the second pass uses a combination of RETRIEVE and a 
copy of the floppy (BACKUP, SPIT-N-IMAGE, and other utilities - many of 
which I found on your floppies!) to a "new-old-stock" floppy to pull the 
information off. The third pass will be my "final pass" using whatever I 
can cobble together - which may not be much, and may not even work. Any 
floppies that I am unable to convert will be passed on to Tim, I guess.

I have so far converted around 150 or so of the RS-DOS floppies in this 
manner. Each floppy is "labeled" (using a post-it note), and noted in a 
text index using a 8.3 format filename designator (which is very terse, 
but documented).

I can't give you any more information than that - I will continue 
working on this in my spare time, and hopefully give you more "regular" 
updates (none of this beating around the bush for 6 months). I sincerely 
appologize for my lapse.

After getting the disks converted, I still need to scan the floppies and 
envelopes, plus documentation, to make things complete - I am not 
certain that I will scan every floppy, my scanner is nowhere near fast 
enough. I will, however, scan the "interesting" ones, plus any that have 
notes on them (of course). Once all of that is completed, I will package 
it all up on a CD-R or something, and send it to you to look over, then 
we can decide on how to release it for general usage (if you want).

-- Andrew L. Ayers
    Glendale, Arizona