Transfering from the PC to the Acorn
Format a disk to PC DOS 720K (older acorns
cannot read 1.4MB PC discs, but can read 720K)
It may be easiest to do this on the Acorn.
Put the mouse pointer over the floppy disc icon on the icon bar (or Task Bar as it is on a PC, but Acorn had it ages ago!)
Click the MIDDLE button. The middle button always opens up a context sensitive menu.
Go sideways from 'Format' and find DOS 720K.
Once you've copied the files onto disc and put the PC disc into the Arc, click the LEFT button over the floppy disc icon to open the directory viewer. You can then drag and drop between directory views to copy. If you only have one floppy drive you can put in a different disc, open it up and drag & drop between them. Use ADFS 800K (E) format normally - its faster.
The problem with the transfer from PC to Acorn is that the file type information is lost. So you have to change the filetypes - more on this below.
I have Archived these programs using SPARK by David Pilling - it's likeWINZIP. A free program called SPARKPLUG can be used to unzip them and I have it here.
Sparkplug is a self-extracting program written in BASIC.
To set the filetype put the mouse pointer
over the Sparkplug file icon. Click
the MIDDLE button. A filer menu appears. Go down to File 'SPARK~1'
then sideways and down to 'Set Type'. Go sideways again,
type in BASIC and press return.
The icon should change to a blue script thing. Double-click on
the file icon and the Sparkplug Application will be created in
your root directory.
Now find !Sparkplug (Application names always begin with !)
Double-click on it. An icon will appear on the right hand side
of the task-bar. It then acts automatically to open an archive
file when you double-click it.
Set the file types of all of the .arc files to ARCHIVE.
Double-click on the archive file and it will open to show the
contents. Drag and drop the contents where you would like to store
them. Double-click to run the application.