The story of X-Copy on the Amiga

Summary

The most popular Amiga program ever? We had a chat with Christian Bartsch who worked at X-Copy publisher Cachet. We have talked a lot about Amiga games here on Spillhistorie.no, but if we had to guess, there was one program that was far more popular on the platform than almost any game released for it: X-Copy. This program allowed Amiga users to copy entire disks, even if those disks didn’t use standard AmigaDOS – and thus, it quickly became the favorite tool of those who wanted to copy games. In other words, the vast majority of Amiga owners, who typically owned a small handful of original games and several disk boxes full of pirated games. The slightly ironic part is that X-Copy was also a commercial product, which, of course, was heavily pirated. The program came from the German company Cachet Software, and we have spoken with Cachet veteran Christian Bartsch – who now works with the KryoFlux system used for digitizing and preserving disks – about the history of X-Copy. We have also learned exciting details about Cachet Software and how KryoFlux came into existence. White Lightning, a predecessor to X-Copy. How was X-Copy originally created, and what was the intention behind the program? X-Copy Professional was originally programmed by Frank Neuhaus and Hans Georg Berg for Cachet Software, but there is a long story which has never before been documented in detail. Frank and Hans Georg released a single floppy copier named White Lightning, and right after it a program called Fast Lightning through Vesalia Computer in 1988. Vesalia was run by the Does family, by the way, they kept the spirit for decades and were in business until recently. Unfortunately Vesalia did not realise the need and potential of a decent copy program. They only sold about 500 copies of it in total. Frank and Hans Georg were very disappointed about the low sales performance. At the same time Claus Peter Lippert (Cachet’s CEO) was working for American publisher Discovery Software as their head...