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Welcome

Welcome to TI-Disk Manager Wiki!

The TI-Disk Manager is a disk tool for disk images made from floppy disks used by a TI-99/4A Home Computer.
This application is written in Objective-C for the macOS Cocoa framework.

Requirements:

To use this application, you will need an Apple Computer or a Hackintosh running with macOS 10.9 to 11.6. TI-Disk Manager is currently not compatible with macOS 12 (aka. Monterey) and is not able to run on these machines.
Since version 2.7.21, the TI-Disk Manager can be surely used with the older macOS 10.8.

Features:

  • You can collect all you disk images into one centrally managed location
  • Handles disk track based as well as disk sector based image files
    • Provides functions to create or edit TI disk images of various density and capacity
    • Provides all basis functions for managing files and directories (rename, copy, paste, move, delete, format, creating new directories etc. by using shortcuts aswell by drag&drop)
    • Provides test tools for checking and repairing damaged disk images and defragmenting files
  • Provides a Diskinfo panel to display various information:
    • General file attributes, like file sizes, used sectors, cluster information and which sectors on the disk are assigned to the file.
    • A preview functionality for viewing files through various internal file decoder (see below) for files like text files, Basic or Assembler code and various graphic formats.
    • Different views for hexdumps, each for record based files (which only shows the reference data) respectively files of type PROGRAM.
  • Various file decoder for decoding following files:
    • Various graphic formats (such as Print-Cad by Marc Huyghe, Fractals by Michael Zapf, YAPP by Alexander Hulpke, MyArt by Myarc, TI-Artist by Inscebot Inc., GraphX or GIF)
    • Decoding Basic program files (in its different achievements: PROGRAM, Merge, Long format) to thier source code
    • Disassembles Assembler program files and list their source code
    • Decoding DIS/VAR 80 files into clean text
    • Decoding other file formats of some of my self made programs.
  • Export function of all decodable file contents. Otherwise, if there is no decoder found for a specific file content, you can export a binary file or a hexdump.
  • Various import possibilities
    • Import Mac graphic files like GIF files and store them as DIS/FIX 128
    • Import plain Mac text files (.txt or .rtf) and store them as DIS/VAR 80
    • Import common binray Mac files (.bin) and store them as any file format the TI-99 supports
    • Import of Assembler, Basic and GPL source code as executable binary files using the xdt99
    • Import and export function for TiFiles encoded files.
  • An interactive editor to disassemble assembly language program files to create good readable source code. Here you have a sophisticated tool for enhancing your code with comments, labels and have the opportunity to format program data as mnemonic, buffers, constants or text.
  • The disassembler covers the mnemonics of nearly all processors of the 99'er family by TI (i.e. TMS9900, TMS9995, TMS99110, TMS9980, TMS9940)

(The last feature is a very sophisticated one! It helped me a lot to decrypt some file formats and writing file decoders.)

One note: You use TI-Disk Manager at your own risk! I have tested it as good as I possibly can, but it can may be included undiscovered errors which could also lead to data loss. Please be sure you have an backup of your data before using this application! It is on your own responsibility to do that!
Please help me to improve this tool by reporting any issues using the issue tracker.
If you want to use this application, you can find a download link and an overview of all releases in the release page.

This site is made for deploying and distributing the TI-Disk Manager only. There is no repository available for you where you can get the code. But if you wish to contribute something to this project, you are welcome! Please contact me on my Profile (you have to register/log in first) and introduce yourself and your proposals.

Please do not upload or redistribute TI-Disk Manager to any other sites.

(A little bit of) History

Unfortunately, Apple users often have left behind. And, when I started developing, I didn't know any tool like mine for use with macOS.
For this reason, I begun (of course, primarily for my own purposes) the development for this tool in the beginning of 2011 (I think it was the 24th of January 2011). My first goal was to learn how to program applications with Objective C in Cocoa (This application was more or less the first program I made on this platform).
The second reason I started this project was, that I needed a tool to transfer all my ancient floppy disks for a backup on more modern data storage media.
The third and main reason: I hate using cryptic command line tools and I hate using Windows Software on my Macintosh. My hard disk is not a dump ground for multiple virtual operation systems and emulator software. So I don't want to waste hundreds of gigabytes of memory, only for using a little tool which is a few megabytes large, which has a bad user interface and is not very useful for my needs.

I want to make the TI-Disk Manager available for other Mac users and I hope it will help to do you good service.

  • A Wiki page with the release history where you can find detailed information about each release. There you can also find downloads for each version.
  • A separated page with screen shots where you can see some of the features described above.
  • A Roadmap Wiki Page with all planned features of TI-Disk Manager
  • It would be great if you would help to get TI-Disk Manager better. Please enter your bugs, proposals and missing features at the issue tracker.
    If there were bugs with specific files or disks, you can also upload disk images there, so i can retrace the issue.
  • You find a discussion thread for TI-Disk Manager on AtariAge.

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