This release has been a very long time in the making. Sorry about that! So many moving parts in my life over the last several months. The long move is just about over, and as long as everything goes smoothly, I only have a bit over a month to go before I can start moving into the new digs. Until then, I am still mooching a place to live from my folks. Unfortunately this means that most of my equipment is still packed away in boxes which I don’t have access. I mailed a box of drives and such to myself in order to get some work done while I am in this limbo state, but unfortunately USPS managed to destroy just about every drive even with careful packing. Needless to say, making progress on Applesauce has required a lot more effort than usual.
With that being said, there are a tremendous number of fixes and improvements in this update. Below is a list of the more important changes.
Added native support for Apple Silicon machines. These M1 machines are crazy fast!
FAST IMAGER 5.25
- Images saved in .WOZ format could sometimes have their track length marked incorrectly which would cause corrupted sectors when writing the image to disk.
- Commodore formatted disks that required the use of the Retry Bad functionality would sometime lose count of the number of tracks on the disk and save to a .D64 file with the last track missing.
FLUX IMAGER 5.25
- Completely rebuilt using better capture techniques.
- Allows imaging of any GCR, FM, and MFM disks. Apple, Atari, Commodore, and PC disks are now officially supported for imaging along with additional metadata fields. Data repair routines and bit/nibble based image formats are still under construction for non-Apple disks.
- Added support for imaging 40 track disks.
FLUX IMAGER 3.5
- Fixed crash that could occur when imaging a 3.5″ HD disk in a DD drive.
DISK WRITER (ALL)
- Changed flow for formatting blank disks. You now need to select the format from the “Format As…” dropdown and then press the “Format Disk” button.
DISK WRITER 3.5
- Fixed bug with Disk Writer not properly turning off the drive when encountering a fatal error while writing a disk.
DIAGNOSTICS
- Improved method of detecting the maximum number reachable tracks for a 5.25″ drive that also provides more accurate results and checks for up to 45 tracks.
- Fixed bug with ever accelerating progress indicators.
- Check Disk function will no longer attempt other tests if it cannot read a disk since they would all fail anyway.
FILE SYSTEM PARSING
- Improved handling of FAT12 disks containing a partially corrupted directory. All non-corrupt data will be parsed. Better cleanup of invalid characters in volume names. Also fixed an issue with parsing directories that had an empty entry.
- Support of 800K MFS disks has been added.
- Will salvage any good data from a corrupted file on an Apple DOS 3.3/3.2 disk.
DISK ANALYZER
- Fixed a crash that could occur when parsing an MFM track that contained no sectors.
- .WOZ files weren’t always unpacking properly when loading and could incorrectly show data errors around the loop point of a track.
- Fixed colorizing issue with IBM sectors in the nibble stream view.
- Fixed a UI issue that would occur when view resource forks of Mac and Apple II disks. After viewing an empty resource, it wouldn’t allow you to view other resources.
FIRMWARE
- Applesauce firmware has been updated to version 2.17.
- Added support for quarter track stepping up through 40 tracks for 5.25 disks.
- Head movement allowed through 45 tracks for 5.25 disks.
- Improved performance of flux capturing routines.
The new release is available via the automatic update mechanism in the app or can be downloaded directly from here.