Everything in the box

Dual-pane file management

A Norton-style, Star Commander style two-pane layout puts your local PC on one side and a second folder, an open disk image, or - if you have one - your Ultimate's filesystem on the other. The active pane is highlighted with a customisable focus ring; Tab swaps focus, every F-key acts on the active pane.

• Drag-and-drop between panes - and to and from Windows Explorer, straight into a disk image.
• Copies say where they land: F5 and F6 show From and To before anything is written, and the source and target panes are framed.
• A copy that won't fit on the disk is stopped before a byte is written, with Copy what fits as a way out.
• Per-pane home folder so each side starts where you actually work.
• Column visibility (Type, Size, Modified, plus load address and start track/sector inside a disk) - toggleable.

Single-screen mode

Maximise one pane and work between its two halves: browse your collection in one, keep the disk you're filling in the other, and flip between Browse and Work with Ctrl+M. It's built for the classic Commodore workflow - compiling your own collections, like a music disk, a demo disk or a best-of, from many sources at once.

Big archives list without waiting, so you can step through source disk after source disk and F5 each file straight across - no endless mount / unmount cycle while you fill one big disk.

Live disk-image editing

Open a .d64, .d71, or .d81 and it behaves like a folder in the pane. No extract-edit-repack cycle, no temp files, no separate "disk tool". Every operation you already know from Norton / Total / Far Commander works directly on the entries inside.

All writes happen on the real disk image bytes via the in-house CBM filesystem layer (D64 - including the 40-track DolphinDOS / SpeedDOS / PrologicDOS variants - D71, D81, D80, D82 and DNP all support write; G64 and T64 are read-only). Ctrl+Z undoes up to 64 steps - copies, moves, renames, deletes, stamps, even a BAM repair - and Ctrl+Y redoes a disk edit.

Safer edits. A disk that was changed outside the app (say, by an emulator) is detected and reloaded instead of overwritten, saves are all-or-nothing, and a disk attached in VICE can still be saved. Safe Mode gates writes if you want to browse without risk.

Show deleted, restore

Switch on Show deleted and scratched files appear in the listing, dimmed. Pick one and Restore as PRG, SEQ, USR, REL or CBM brings it back - in D81 partitions and subdirectories, for scratched partitions, and for GEOS files too.

Restoring is an ordinary edit, so Ctrl+Z takes it back if you picked the wrong one.

Find in disks & favourite folders

Ctrl+Shift+F searches inside your disk images - including D64s packed in .zip, .7z and .rar, D81 partitions and DNP folders - and can match a disk by its name or ID. An archive that takes too long is skipped and counted, so a search never hangs on one slow file.

Ctrl+Shift+D remembers the place you're in - a PC folder, a folder on the Ultimate, even a spot inside a disk or zip - and Ctrl+D takes you back to any of them.

A look under the hood

F4 opens the Disk Inspector for the selected image: a disk report, a BAM check that can repair what it finds, and a BAM / sector map of every track. Click a sector to see it as hex and PETSCII, and follow the link to the next sector in the chain.

In the listing itself you can switch on the load address and the start track/sector of every file. Shift+F3 opens any file in the hex viewer, whose glyph column switches between PETSCII, screen codes and ASCII.

Three ways to launch a PRG

Press F1 on a .PRG (or a PRG inside a D64) to run it the default way - the key bar tells you what will happen, e.g. Load A & Run. Hold a modifier to pick a variant on the spot.

Shift+F1 runs from the other drive, Alt+F1 loads without running, and F9 / Shift+F9 just mount a disk on drive A or B. Each launch can be paired with a pre-reset: None (safest default), Hard reset, or Reboot Ultimate (gated behind a setting because it ends any running session).

No Ultimate? Pick an emulator as the launch target - VICE, Denise, Hoxs64 or CCS64 - and F1 starts the file there instead. SID and Sidplayer .mus tunes play the same way, on the Ultimate or in an emulator. The full launch guide →

Device discovery

On first start with no address set, Retro Commander looks for an Ultimate on your network by itself. Or click Scan on the Connection tab of Settings: it probes TCP/80 across your subnet and confirms each hit over the REST API, typically in a second or two. No need to remember IP addresses or fish them out of your router.

And discovery is just the doorway. Once connected you can edit a D64 that lives on the device in place, read its status and full configuration, reset, reboot or power it off, and play SIDs on the real chip. See the full Ultimate guide →

Offline mode

A master kill-switch in Settings ▸ Connection that suppresses every device-side network call: no REST probes, no FTP login, no heartbeat, no auto-discovery. The app starts and runs as a plain dual-pane local file manager.

Useful on the road, when the C64U is powered off, or when you just want to organise files without any background chatter.

Layout & focus ring

Shift+F11 cycles the pane layout, F11 shows or hides the preview, and Ctrl+U cycles which panes are visible - or go all in with single-screen mode.

The active-pane focus ring is yours to tune, per pane: colour, hue, saturation, brightness and opacity - so the active side is always obvious at a glance, in the app's dark theme.