FCopy III @ D81.DE

The C64 floppy disk copy program FCopy III from Thomas Tempelmann

Here you can download a collection of the great C64 floppy disk copy program FCopy III. The disk image does not only contain this single version, but many modified versions for e.g. 40 track support. It also contains many versions prior to version 3.0.

History

Thomas Tempelmann created the copy programs FCopy and FCopy II, who did not need any additional hardware. Later he got to know Oliver Eikemeier and Oliver Joppich, who both invented the SpeedDOS floppy speeder system for the C64 and together they developed FCopy III. Thomas mainly was responsible for the low level disk I/O routines and parts of the copy protection, Oliver and Oliver did the loader and other stuff. Although FCopy III was built on top of SpeedDOS, it doesn't need the kernel extensions itself, but the parallel cable, that comes with it. In principal FCopy III does work, if you only put such a parallel cable between the C64 and the floppy. No wonder, that FCopy III was patched for many other parallel speeder systems like Dolphin-DOS, Professional-DOS and many more by enthusiastic C64 hackers.

After the first successful crack (presumably done by Crackman/CRM), this tool became one of the widest spreaded pirate copies in the mid 1980'ies. The latter one and its big name recognition in return spawned many patched and modificated versions of FCopy III.

Download:

FCopy-PC

There has also a transfer system built onto FCopy III, which connects a C64 with a PC. It's name is FCopy-PC and you can find the C64 stub program on the disk presented above with all the other FCopy versions. FCopy-PC got acquainted with the Unicorn-CD, which is still sold on the Whiz-Zards page as C64CD96. Watch out, there is also the Turbo-ASS source code of the C64 FCopy-PC stub on the disk.

The PC software for the FCopy-PC system is packed into another ZIP archive, you can find some more informations about it at the Space Taxi D64-Cable pages.

Download:
  • FCopy-PC transfer system (2002-11-30, 48KB)

    ZIP archive containing the full FCopy-PC distribution with all files and documents needed.

Source codes

The original distribution source of the FCopy-PC transfer system, the Unicorn-CD, also contained several assembler sources of FCopy III. While the very first versions have only been very poorly documented disassembly listings of FCopy III and FCopy III for Dolphin-DOS, a programmer named »Merlin« of the C64 group The Whiz-zards Association successively created new variants out of it.

The first new variant was built for C64 systems, that were expanded with a 256K RAM expansion as presented in issue 07/1987 of the german C64 magazine »64'er«. The desired source contains some documentation and seems to be the code base for two other development branches. One was a version of FCopy III that takes two disk drives into account, so that you don't need to exchange source and destination disks several times. The other one leads to the C64 stub part of the FCopy-PC transfer system. The source code of the FCopy-PC stub is the best documented of all found.

Further FCopy source code related downloads and documents
  • FCopy ASM source codes (2002-11-30, 240KB)

    ZIP archive containing all the ASM source codes of the different FCopy variants discussed here. The archive not only contains two D64 images files with C64 related, Turbo-ASS formatted listings, but also all the files converted to standard ASCII text files as well as a differences distance chart.

  • The PDF document »difference distances« shows the results of some deeper analyses of all the FCopy ASM sources and selected binary versions found on the Unicorn-CD.

  • The HTML'ized version of the partly documented ASM source code of the FCopy-PC stub.

 

Wolfgang Moser, 2003-05-25,  ,  ("contact me" form disabled due to too high demand, sorry)