Using these greaseweazle commands to read from both sides of a C64 ‘flippy’ disk
Creating .d64 disk images from both sides of a ‘flip[y’ disk using greaseweazle commands seems to be possible using these two command line instructions. As long as these do not contain any copy protection methods these appear to create readable images that can be used with emulation software such as VICE.
This is a quick post, mainly to give me somewhere to record the GreaseWeazel commands I recently used to be able to create some archive images of some C64 floppy disks that came with one of my recent purchases.
These commands won’t work with any floppy that has any form of copy protection but have worked with ‘flippy’ disks that were used with a Commodore 1541 disk drive.
It took a lot of surfing around on the web to be able to do enough looking around to be able to work out these two command lines to be able to create a .d64 image correctly.
As I was using a PC Floppy Drive (DS/DD 360k) with the Greaseweazel these commands work without having to physically ‘flip’ the disk. Instead the commands specify the head (side of the disk) to read to create the .d64 image contents.
The .d64 images were read correctly and I could load the programs from the disk images using VICE without any issues (other emulators are available, this is just my preferred one).
# Command to read the first side of the disk
gw read --tracks h=0:c=0-34 --format commodore.1541 DISK1_S1.d64
# Command to read the second side of the disk
gw read --tracks hswap:h=0:c=4-34:h0.off=-4 --reverse --format commodore.1541 DISK1_S2.d64
“Flippy” disks for the Commodore 64 are 5.25-inch floppies modified by creating a second notch on the side of the floppy to enable it be used on both sides when flipped over in the drive.
Effectively this doubled the storage that could be obtained from a floppy disk from 170 KB to 340 KB saving a fair bit of money, back in the day.
