CFOG's PIP, February 1988, Volume 7 No. 1, Whole No. 63, page 5

More File Conversion Programs for CP/M

by Benjamin H. Cohen

Copyright 1987 Benjamin H. Cohen.

In addition to the commercial Media Master and UniForm programs there are two additional programs, COMPAT, from Mycroft Labs, and MultiCopy from Plu*Perfect Systems. I'm running both on my Kaypro 10 which has only one floppy drive, in addition to UniForm and Media Master. I've prepared a file I call FORMATS.LST, which is currently in version 2, distributed as FORMATS2.LZT. It lists the formats supported by COMPAT, UniForm, Media Master, and MultiCopy. Suffice it to say there are lots of formats and each program has some that none of the others has. If ou have specific needs you should check FORMATS.LST in the most recent version before you buy.

Media Master, as Steve Lucius notes, is all menu driven and restricts you to acting within its framework. UniForm is better in that it configures one of your drives to the foreign format so that you can work directly with the disk, but only for CP/M formats. For MS-DOS formats UniForm is menu driven and forces you to use its system for accessing the directory of a disk or copying files. Like Media Master, in this mode UniForm cannot let you see the contents of a disk file or run a program. Both Media Master and UniForm are one program for all purposes.

COMPAT and MultiCopy generally work the same way: you have two programs, one to format disks and one to set drives. You don't have menus, you have a separate list of formats and you add the format designator as a command tail when executing the program. For example, you enter multicpy FD1 56 -F to format an Osborne SSDD disk. With COMPAT you enter Format osborn2. To set the drive to Osborne SSDD format you would enter Turboset 56 with MultiCopy and Compat osborn2 with COMPAT.

COMPAT and UniForm both sit in high memory while they are resident, stealing some of your computer's TPA (Transient Program Area, the portion of your computers RAM or main memory reserved for running programs and their data files). With the TurboROM in m Kaypro 10, however, MultiCopy uses NO TPA to set my one floppy drive to any of the formats that it can work with (it would be 89 formats if I had a quad-density floppy; it's about 50 without that).

Plu*Perfect Systems has just released a new version of MultiCopy. With the new version TurboROM Kaypros can set a floppy drive to MS-DOS format as well as CP/M formats, and a new program included with MultiCopy, DOSDISK, allows your Kaypro to directly read and write MS-DOS format disks using their CP/M programs. It's not foolproof: VDE isn't able to read files on the MS-DOS disk, but NewSweep works nicely.

I found COMPAT at CP/M Connection, Box 236, McPherson, KS 67460, 316-241-3100, for $34.24, in versions for Kaypro Sanyo, Televideo, Zenith and Zorba. They also offer UniForm for Actrix, Bondwell, Epson, Kaypro, Micromint. Morrow, NEC PC, Osborne, Televideo, Toshiba, Xerox, and Zenith, for $59.99.

MultiCopy is $39 from Plu*Perfect Systems, Box 1494, Idyllwild, CA 92349. The TurboROM is $59.95 and MultiCopy ought to be $39. Add $5 shipping. You can probably get it for $25 if you purchase it with the TurboROM. For the advantages of the TurboROM itself, see the August 1987 issue of PIP.

Media Master can be obtained from Spectre Technologies, Inc., 22458 Ventura Blvd., Suite E, Woodland Hills, CA 91364, [800] 824-7888, operator 407, $39.95 plus $4 shipping per order. Media Master is available for Osborne 1 and Executive (it was bundled with Vixen) , all Kaypro CP/M compturs (except Robie), Zenith Z-100, Sanyo 555, and IBM PC/XT/AT and most compatibles. A DEC Rainbow version is $99.95.