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 ...
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 running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS. It was originally developed by Anders Hejlsberg at ...
; 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 c ...
.
VGA-Copy was originally released as
shareware: A free test version was spread through
bulletin board systems 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. 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 (
AT class) computer with 1MB of
RAM, as well as on
Micro Channel architecture systems. VGA-Copy/386 versions 6.x improved performance on modern machines, but required an
Intel 386 CPU and 4MB of RAM.
In 1999 the latest version, 6.25, of VGA-Copy/386 was released as
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 t ...
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 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 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.
See also
*
HD-Copy
References
Further reading
* {{cite book , last= , first= , date=1994 , title=VGA-Copy/386 Programmdokumentation , url= , location=Oldenburg , publisher=Isensee Verlag Oldenburg , page= , isbn=3-89442-175-4 , accessdate=
External links
VGA-Copy on Thomas Mönkemeier's web page, includes download of latest version
DOS software
Floppy disk computer storage