VGA-Copy is an MS-DOS program to copy

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

s. It is able to read defective floppy disks.

Development

VGA-Copy was created by the German software developer Thomas Mönkemeier. The main code was developed in

Turbo Pascal Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment (IDE) for the Pascal (programming language), Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS. It was originally develo ...

; some low-level hardware parts were written in

Turbo Assembler Turbo Assembler (sometimes shortened to the name of the executable, TASM) is an assembler for software development published by Borland in 1989. It runs on and produces code for 16- or 32-bit x86 MS-DOS and compatible on Microsoft Windows. It ...

. VGA-Copy was originally released as

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

: A free test version was spread through

bulletin board system A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...

s and shareware CDs; a license key file to turn the test version into a full version could be ordered for a payment. The shareware version had two limitations: it had a ten-second waiting time on startup and it was not able to write to individual boot sectors. Later the limitations changed to requiring to enter a 5-digit number on startup. The first public version of VGA-Copy was 2.0. Some earlier full versions were published by

cdv Software Entertainment CDV Software Entertainment AG (formerly CDV Software GmbH, stylized as cdv) was a German publisher of video games founded 1989 in Karlsruhe. On April 17, 2000, cdv became a Frankfurt stock market traded company. In the beginning of the 2000s, ...

. Later versions were published under the names VGA-Copy Pro and VGA-Copy/386. VGA-Copy Pro 5.3 was the last version to work on an

Intel 286 The Intel 80286 (also marketed as the iAPX 286 and often called Intel 286) is a 16-bit microprocessor that was introduced on February 1, 1982. It was the first 8086-based CPU with separate, non-multiplexed address and data buses and also the f ...

( AT class) computer with 1MB of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

, as well as on

Micro Channel architecture Micro Channel architecture, or the Micro Channel bus, is a proprietary 16- or 32-bit parallel computer bus introduced by IBM in 1987 which was used on PS/2 and other computers until the mid-1990s. Its name is commonly abbreviated as "MCA", alth ...

systems. VGA-Copy/386 versions 6.x improved performance on modern machines, but required an

Intel 386 The Intel 386, originally released as 80386 and later renamed i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

without restrictions. It is still available for download on the author's web page. Later, Mönkemeier confirmed the freeware status extends to any previously released full version.

Features

VGA-Copy was popular because it could often read floppy disks with errors. It does so by automatically doing multiple read retries on errors. Furthermore, VGA-Copy can read floppy images and saves them with the extension as a 1:1 raw copy of the floppy disk without special headers and formats. A special feature of VGA-Copy is the ability to format floppies with capacities beyond the normal specifications. It is able to format floppy disks with a specified capacity of 1.4 megabytes with up to 1.7 megabytes of capacity (see also 2M). It also supports the

Distribution Media Format Distribution Media Format (DMF) is a format for floppy disks that Microsoft used to distribute software. It allowed the disk to contain 1680 KB of data on a 3-inch disk, instead of the standard 1440 KB. As a side effect, utilities had to ...

used by Microsoft. To access such over-formatted floppies VGA-Copy delivered a special persistent DOS driver. VGA-Copy has the ability to compress images with the

ARJ ARJ (Archived by Robert Jung) is a software tool designed by Robert K. Jung for creating high-efficiency data compression, compressed file archives. ARJ is currently on version 2.86 for MS-DOS and 3.20 for Microsoft Windows and supports 16-bit, 3 ...

packer. It is able to scan floppies for boot sector viruses with an internal heuristic and can also scan the full floppy with

F-Prot FRISK Software International (established in 1993) was an Icelandic software company that developed F-Prot antivirus and F-Prot AVES antivirus and anti-spam service. The company was founded in 1993. It was acquired by Cyren in 2012. History Th ...

References

External links

VGA-Copy on Thomas Mönkemeier's web page, includes download of latest version

DOS software Floppy disk computer storage

Development

Features

See also

References

Further reading

External links