I’m very close to completely converting all of my old physical C64 disks into D64 disk images, a project I started roughly 10 years ago — not that it takes 10 years to convert ~600 floppies into D64 disk images (it only takes a minute or two to do a disk), but there have been a lot of stops and starts. Along the way I’ve used three of four different methods (x1541 cables, the FC5025, the Ultimate 1541, and my current method of choice, the ZoomFloppy) and experimented with several different tools and methods to ensure that I’m getting the most data possible from these old floppies.

Now, most of the floppies I’m capturing look like this:

In my digital collection, that’s “Disk 009,” and I’ll end up with two files (009A and 009B, one for each side). But occasionally, I run across old disks of mine that look like this:

Not all glue was created equal, and many of the labels I used for numbering disks have dried up and fallen off, never to be seen again. This bothers me to no end because now I don’t know what to call this disk image. Right know it’s called “Unknown-034.”

While rummaging through these old virtual warez I ran across a disk labelled “DCMR.” DCMR stands for “Disk Catalog Manager/Reporter.” I vaguely remember using it in the mid-80s. After converting the disk over to a D64 file I loaded it up in an emulator and found that not only did I apparently use it extensively, but that it contains a nearly complete list of every program from every disk. Hey, this could be useful!

The first thing I did was make backups of my old lists and put them on the same disk as DCMR using DirMaster by Style. (If you do anything with D64 disk images, you should download DirMaster immediately. It’s an invaluable tool that I rely on for cleaning up disk images and moving files from one image to another.)

With all the files on one disk, I loaded up DCMR…

…and was able to search for the first game on that mysterious disk. Apparently, this was originally disk 381!

Wahoo! One mystery solved, and I plan on using this newly discovered data to figure out what the rest of those disks with missing labels originally were. Man, this is awesome!