By Zorg

VERSION 2.1

Visits since November 2004

MSA Converter is an utility destinated to convert and manipulate the disk image files used by ATARI ST emulators. It is designed to work with Windows 95 and more. It also allows to view some of the graphic image formats used on Atari directly from disk images or from the hard disk.

The main functions are :

• Disk image exploration with the possibility of adding / deleting / viewing files

• Disk image format conversion (ST, MSA, DIM, STT)

• Zip file conversion to ST or MSA disk image formats

• Displays the state of the clusters from a disk image

• Batch ZIP compression of multiple single files

• Duplicate files search (Useful for a big collection of disk images)

• Blank disk image creation with lots of parameters

• Bilingual French/English

If somebody is ok, I accept any help to translate the documentation to other languages. The original file has been created with Openoffice 1.1.0.

New features of version 2.1:

Bugs fixed:

• Fixed MSA conversion which was broken (Thanks Brume)

• Fixed ST files track number detection which was broken too (Thanks Brume)

Added:

• Possibility to choose the format of the destination file name and of the zip file name in the options window

Modifications:

• Added filesize control during Explorer->Disk image transfert to avoid loading huge files in memory for nothing

• Updated Zipforge component to version 2.55. The program is now smaller

Supported command line parameters :

* msa "user_path" "folder"

• Replace "folder" by the complete directory you want to use in the fileselector

* msa "convert" "disk image" "destination format" "nb of files for msa"

• "disk image" is the name of the file to be converted

• "destination format" must be "st" or "msa"

• "nb of files for msa" must be "1" or "2" and is only used for msa destination format

* msa "diskimg_to_hdisk" "disk image" "folder"

• "disk image" is the name of the file to be used

• "folder" is the destination directory for the content of the disk image

* msa "disk image"

• "disk image" is the file to be openned in MSA Converter

* msa "zip_to_diskimg" "file.zip" "destination file.st"

• "file.zip" is the name of the ZIP file to be converted

• "destination file.st" is the name of the destination ST disk image

• This function is only added for compatibily with the STEEM disk manager V3.1. To convert ZIP files to disk images, please use the "convert" function which is more complete.

Optionnal parameters which must be placed at the end of the command line:

• "zip" activates the compression when needed

• "exit" closes MSA Converter at the end of the selected operation

• "show" to display the command line received by the program

All parameters should be written between quotation marks to avoid problems with spaces in the filenames