Mark Percival’s fantastic DiskMaker 8 software has been made open source! Mark and I collaborated to publish both ORCA/M (8-bit) and ca65-assembly code to GitHub, with the ca65-based version serving as the basis for future versions of the software.
Originally inspired by Eric Shepherd’s 16-bit DiskMaker, Percival’s 8-bit DiskMaker 8 v1.1 was released in 2006 as shareware and was reclassified in 2021 as freeware. Among its features:
- Creates physical disks from disk images, formats the destination disk if required
- GSOS File Manager like user interface allowing user to easily navigate through volumes/directories
- Optional Apple mouse support for instant ease of use
- Multiple image format conversion capability including: .dsk, .po, .hdv, .2mg, DiskCopy 4.2-6
- Supports AppleShare volumes for retrieving image files
- Fully supports Disk ][ and SmartPort block devices for writing images
- Displays volumes that match the size of the disk image selected, allows overriding
- Supports DOS 3.3 volume numbers
- Optionally boots directly to your new disk.
In addition to the source code, disk images of v1.1 are available in both GitHub and the Internet Archive.