By Colin Fisher-McAllum

...Maybe?

E-Copy is another German product translated into English and distributed in the UK by System Solutions. Packed in the usual A5 plastic wallet is a DD disk and manual. The first thing that struck me was the wire bound manual [Did it hurt? - FFF]. My preference is for loose leaf manuals of this kind as they stay flat when open on the desk. I hope this is the new style for all System Solutions product manuals. As you would expect the manual is clear and well laid out. There is even a 2 page chapter on "Disk Theory" that is an interesting and informative read.

Following the installation procedure as printed in the manual, I was surprised to see the installation had failed. You are asked to enter the serial number from the disk and then, "A keycode, which you have to invent, this is a private and personal code"... BUZZZ Wrong! As well as the serial number on the disk is the word "Schluessel" followed by... you guessed it, the keycode. Installation complete.

Strangely enough, E-Copy is a disk copying utility. It can run as a program or accessory and the manual says it's multi-tasking friendly, but more of this later. The main interface has most of what you need to action on view, the rest is tucked away in the drop down menus. Top left is the area for selecting Source and Destination. Top right is the dialog for manually setting the the destination disk parameters. Across the middle are eight buttons with pre-definable disk format settings. Below this are the Copy and Format options. Finally at the bottom are the six main action buttons - Copy, Format, Read, Transcopy, Clear disk and Quit. The interface is very pretty and functional. There are keyboard shortcuts for most actions.

Let's go for a little stroll through some of these options. Source and Destination are the obvious 'A' & 'B', but below each is a Steprate option. This like many of E-Copy's functions are best left to the default settings unless you know what you are doing. That said, the steprate is the time in milliseconds the read/write head is moved from one track to the next.

The main display

We have all come across the Manual Disk Parameter settings before in PD programs like Fastcopy 3. By increasing the number of Sectors and Tracks on a disk we can squeeze every last extra byte of storage space from a floppy. Clicking on one of the preset format buttons you will see the disk parameter settings change to indicate the relevant number of sectors and tracks. It is a shame E-Copy does not display the bytes each of these settings would create. Right clicking on one of the default format buttons brings up a dialog where you can edit the button to your own requirements.

When copying a disk it is possible to get E-Copy to check the destination disk and only format if it is needed. This is a good time saver. The option is actually a "Tri-state-button" - on, off and inbetween. If used in conjunction with the Get Disktype option the destination disk will be formatted to the same settings as the source disk. If a standard sector size is selected [9, 15, 18 or 36] you can use the Fast Format option to speed up the formatting of unformatted disks. Multiple Jobs is useful if you have a number of disks to work on. This is not just a multiple copy option, it is also for writing, formatting and disk clearing. You will be prompted to enter the next disk when required. When copying, if the source disk is too large to fit into memory, E-Copy will read and then write the first portion of the disk to as many disks as your require. Pressing Read On will read the next portion of the source disk ready to copy to you disks. You can set up a GEMDOS hard drive partition as a buffer where data is written as a file during a copy action. This is useful if you have little free RAM. To protect against writing over valuable data there is an Analyse option. If enabled, before any destructive process [format, write or clear disk], E-Copy will scan the disk for data. If present you can, if you wish, take a look at the data before continuing.

If you have a DD disk of data that you want to copy to a HD disk, you can use the Transcopy option. This reads the used sectors of the source disk into memory where the calculations are made to compensate for the new boot sector and FAT directory size before writing the data to the new disk. This is not just for copying from one density disk to another, it is useful for disks of the same density that have differing formats.

A quick way to delete data from a disk is to erase its FAT. The Clear Disk option does this and it's much faster than deleting the files or re-formatting the disk. Basically you are just removing the information that tells your computer where the data is contained on the disk, not the data itself. Therefore when you write to the disk you will overwrite the original data.

During all functions a window containing an action bar is displayed to let you know how things are progressing. If at any time E-Copy comes upon an error - a bad sector for example - you will be warned, and depending on the task you are carrying out be allowed to take the appropriate action.

E-Copy Action Bar

Using the Read option you can read the contents of a disk into a buffer ready for copying. At this stage it's no different to using the Copy option. However once the data is in memory you can get E-Copy to create and save a 'DiskIMmage' file. This is a powerful feature for if the image is saved to a hard di

Abbreviations & Acronyms:

AES

Application Environment Services.

AIF

Sound format.

AP

AtariPhile - The bimonthly magazine of the Falcon FacTT File.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Exchange.

AU

Sound format.

AV

AV Protocol - Inter program communication.

AVR

Sound format.

BBS

Bulletin Board System.

CAB

Crystal Atari Browser.

CMY(B)

Cyan Magenta Yellow (Black).

CPU

Central Processing Unit.

DD

Double Density disk.

DOS

Disk Operating System.

DPI

Dots Per Inch.

DSP

Digital Signal Processor.

DTP

Desk Top Publishing.

DVS

Sound format.

ED

Extra (High) Density disk.

FAT

File Allocation Table.

FFF

Falcon FacTT File - A user group for owners of Atari Falcons, TTs and PAKs.

FPU

Floating Point process Unit.

G

Gigabyte.

GDOS

Graphic Device Operating System.

GEM

Graphic Environment Manager.

GEMDOS

Graphic Environment Manager Disk Operating System.

HD

High Density disk.

HSN

Sound format.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language.

IDE

Integrated (or Intelligent) Drive Electronics.

K

Kilobyte.

Mb

Megabyte.

MIPS

Milions of Instructions Per Second.

OCR

Optical Character Recognition.

OS

Operating System.

PD

Public Domain.

PSU

Power Supply Unit.

RAM

Random Access Memory

RGB

Red Green Blue.

ROM

Random Only Memory.

SCSI

Small Computer System Interface.

SIMM

Single In-line Memory Module.

SMP

Sound format.

SND

Sound format.

ST

Sixteen Thirtytwo.

STA - STApps

ST Applications - Magazine of the FaST Club.

STF

ST Format magazine.

SVGA

Super Video Graphics Adaptor.

TOS

The Operating System.

TT

Thirtytwo Thirtytwo.

VDI

Visual Device Interface.

VGA

Video Graphics Adaptor.

WAV

Sound format.

WP

Word Processor.