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Welcome to the cbmconvert wiki!

The cbmconvert tool was originally created in the 1990s when emulators and disk images were not yet common, and the main option to transfer files between 8-bit Commodore computers and the Internet was wired transfer.

Back in the day, some programs did exist to allow multi-file transfers by using an archive file format, so that a single file that was downloaded from a Bulletin Board System (BBS) or a file server would be expanded to multiple files.

A popular file format for the Commodore 8-bit computers was the Lynx (.lnx) format, because it can be expanded in place on any disk drive that uses the common 256-byte sector size with 254 bytes of payload. cbmconvert also supports .arc and .ark archives as a relic from the old days.

Early emulators introduced special file formats: The .t64 tape images of the C64S emulator are entirely specific to that emulator. PC64 introduced .p00 files to overcome MS-DOS file name translation limitations.

While disk image files (such as .d64.gz for gzip compressed 1541 images) are common nowadays, a toolset to convert between different formats may be useful.

A notable omission of cbmconvert is that it does not support low-level images for tapes (often called .tap files) or disks that would represent the raw pulses on the magnetic media. The KERNAL tape format uses 3 distinct pulse widths, storing 2 copies of each block. In our high-level tape image format (sometimes called .cas or .csm), each block is stored only once.