Cubeat 2.0 Atari Mega STE - "No key, Good bye!" under Hatari - looking for a legal way to access old

Cubase
1

Hello,

I am trying to recover MIDI compositions I created around 1990 with Steinberg Cubeat 2.0 on an Atari.

Here is my situation:

  • Original Cubeat 2.0 floppy disk (serial number available)
  • Original song disks containing many .ALL files
  • Hatari 2.6.1 running under Windows 11
  • TOS 1.06

Cubeat starts correctly under Hatari.

It asks to choose the screen driver (VDI or QUICK), then immediately exits with:

“No key, Good bye!”

So it seems that everything works except the Steinberg hardware protection.

I no longer own the original dongle.

My only objective is to recover my old songs and export them as Standard MIDI Files.

I also tried Cubase SX3.
It recognizes the .ALL files through “Import Cubase Project”, starts reading them, then freezes at 3–30%.

My questions are:

  1. Is there any legal way to run Cubeat 2.0 today without the original dongle?
  2. Does Hatari emulate the Steinberg dongle?
  3. Is there another Steinberg product able to read Cubeat 2.0 .ALL files?
  4. Has anybody successfully recovered Cubeat 2.0 songs in recent years?

I still own the original software and the original song disks.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

2

Never heard of Cubeat myself, but in that timeframe, I was mostly MasterTracks Pro.

A way to do what you want at your location and no dongle?

No.

Even with sx3, the elicenser dongle is required…which explains the freeze.

Yes, there are the old program vers on the server (sx etc) that do load .all and then save as cpr for loading into Cubendo15 or whatever. You’ve no doubt seen the big sticky thread on how to do as you mentioned you have sx3.

Your option is to connect with people here at the forums who have dongles and are routinely running old versions (sx etc) to ask/pay them to load & transfer your .all files to cpr on their Win11 systems. A lot of us (like me) have all the old programs installed alongside new Cubendo versions. I personally would not be available to transfer your files, but like I say, the option may be there with others around here.

Another option people occasionally mention is buying a used dongle tied to a Cubase 9 license (or whatever). Those folks often mention old dongles+ licenses are plentiful on obscure markets. Me? Never ever ever see them for sale anywhere :slight_smile:

3

Why, o why, o why, o why, o why, doesn’t Steinberg release a project format convertor?

I used to have it. Today it would be called Cubase Artist. MIDI only, of course!

4

… also, consider voting up this feature request:

5

Have you been able to recover the .ALL files from the floppy disks?

6

J’ai tous mes anciens fichiers .ALL sur disquettes et ils sont récupérables. Mais avec mon cubase SX3 → plantage et avec mon émulation d’Atari (Hatari, à peu près équivalent à Steem → Pas de clé, au revoir !)

7

(translated) “I have all my old files. ALL on diskettes and they are recoverable”

BUT … have you been able to copy them off of the diskettes and save them as files on your hard disk? The reason I ask is because that is not easy to do after 35 years, and the files themselves may be corrupt.

9

haha…I always picture the Monday morning sb Hilton strategy meeting conversation as…

“well, 30 more 80s-era cubase users turned 85yrs old and kicked the bucket this week…shall we allocate 40 hours to pay CarlCodeGuy to whip up an arr/all-to-cpr converter instead of a week work on Cubendo 16?”

Bob, the new guy, speaks up and says “there are forum people who claim we can whip it up in 5 minutes”. Bob is transferred to the mail room on Tuesday, only to realize, there is no mail room.

10

Yeah, I’m one.
But the converter already exists, embedded in SX3.
I can’t believe it would take 40 hours to “rip it out” and wrap an interface around it. Maybe 39…

11

For interested parties following this thread…

OP (Michel) sent a few of his songs for me to have a look. This is what I found…

Cubase 3SX on my windows machine could NOT load the Cubeat.ALL files, so I tried opening them with Cubase 3.1 on an Atari. This worked, so I saved the songs again in ALL format from Cubase 3.1.

At this point Cubase 3SX was able to open the files. As far as I can tell all of the MIDI data to get his songs working again should be there. I did notice some tracks have events marked with different channel numbers but this shouldn’t be a problem in Cubase. Set output to MIDI channel ‘ANY’ if the track is meant to transmit over all of those channels, or chose a single channel if all of the events are meant to be re-routed in real time to a single specific channel.

12

Which brings up an interesting insight regarding this particular thread now that brianroland did some transfers for the op.

The op has one or several Atari 520/1040 floppies with .all files.

In a hypothetical world, Steinberg has an arr/all-to-cpr converter that runs on Win11 and whatnot…and they offer it free no less.

Op says, “yay”…well…not the op…but instead, his op brother in hypotheticalLand.

He runs out and locates a usb floppy drive…followed by a range of increasingly frustrated tickets to Steinberg stating-

  1. My win machine doesn’t read my atari floppies or
  2. my win machine sees the floppies but “your” conversion program doesn’t see them (or the files or whatever) or…
  3. my entire system doesn’t recognize my floppy drive at all…or..
  4. you’s guys should provide a better way to make this easier…or…
  5. I had to send my atari floppies to AaronAtariMan in Alaska to do my transfers and it cost me $8 in postage…what’s wrong with you SB??? Why should I pay $8 to transfer my 198* songs when you supposedly have this converter?

SB, of course, doesn’t respond cuz we’re talkin’ long-discontinued products, no way to know if a non-motherboard-connected floppy drive is the culprit, no way (or responsibility) to track these types of issues down anyway.

16 support tickets later, SB wishes they’d never paid CarlCodeGuy to create the converter …especially when he could’ve been instead working on all those feature ideas that DosWasBest wants in Cubendo 28 like little yellow vu meters on every channel and no plasma meters ever again :slight_smile:

(as you can tell, I have an hour to kill before I have to work on a legal pleading :slight_smile: )

13

Amusing (yes, I did smile), but it’s not Steinberg’s fault if one didn’t transfer files on those old floppies to hard drive when one had the chance. (Yes, I did, when I bought my first PC 31 years ago. (How time flies!))
In my own case, the stuff I do now is way better than the stuff I was doing 15 years ago, let alone when I had an ST. So all that old stuff was binned, long ago.

14

I saw the writing on the wall and transferred mine a long long time ago. Somewhere between VISTA and where we are today Windows started losing the ability to work properly with floppy drives in any format other than MSDOS/FAT (not even able to diskimage them sector by sector), any kind of optical CD/DVD drive that was of a non-standard format (I.E. Roland and AKAI sample disk libraries), etc. Newer machines even began to lack the hardware to get a straight up DOS boot partition, linux, or some other unix derivative accessing floppies…even the USB based options lacked the proper controller chips and motors to deal with anything other than a few very ‘standard’ formats…no hope of reading/writing, or making sector-by-sector disk images of any other type.

While I didn’t abandon the Falcon and ST stuff until well into Cubase7, Windows7 territory, it was clear I should at least archive floppies, and go ahead and convert anything I felt like I’d want to revisit to something more portable.

I also made it a habit to save things as standard MIDI files, export audio stems where necessary, and note where on the timeline such stems should begin playing (usually in the filename itself). It’s still a good idea to do this today if you can afford to set aside the time to do it! With smaller projects, there’s really no excuse not to export your work to some open/standard formats in case you ever want/need to reconstruct the project in any software/hardware combination your heart desires in the future.

I forget which Generation of Cubase/Nuendo added the ability to export stuff in DAWProject and XML formats, but we can in 15 for sure. When a project winds down and you’re about to put it away…Export it in every format your DAW allows! Export SMF for your MIDI and Instrument tracks. Make notes as to exactly where audio stems should start on the timeline. It doesn’t take but a minute to do, there is little lose but a few minutes of time, and possibly much to gain should you ever want to revisit the project in the future.

Up until the dongle was dropped, it never was a problem if you’ve registered Cubase 3 or higher on Windows or Mac. Just grab any variant of Cubase 3.

Now the only obstacle is if you got into Cubase post Dongle and don’t have one with a working Cubase key on it.

I’ve had about 20 years to convert my retro projects (Atari stuff merely scratched the surface. Had all sorts of dedicated hardware sequencers, Amigas, Pre XP DOS/Windows machines, Macs going as far back as OS5, and the list goes on). Plenty of time. I suspect most people from the Atari Age have done the same, or possibly kept a working machine or two on standby.

It’s not very often I see people here on the forums asking for help to get into old ARR and ALL files. Maybe an ‘average’ of once or twice per year?

I agree a converter of some sort would be nice. The obvious ‘feature request’ would be to just build it into Cubase 12 (the earliest version that works without a dongle) and be done with it. It’s probably easier said than done. There’s likely a very good reason they didn’t just ‘keep it’ in every version to this very day. There is probably a ‘good reason’ they removed legacy ALL/ARR support when they did.

Another solution might be to release a bare bones version of Cubase 3 that doesn’t need a dongle, and is just good enough to get the job done. Again, easier said than done. Those old hosts don’t work with software eLicencer, and the Steinberg dongle for PC/Mac is super famous for being extremely difficult if not impossible to emulate/crack/bypass/etc.

I gather some cracks for old versions of Cubase exist. I own official Atari Dongles, but have seen a few cracks over the years. None of them were stable enough to really trust…the dongle scheme was that good at protecting unauthorized use of the software.

Is it worth it to Steinberg to put much if any time into doing a converter of some sort for their dead platforms in 2026? I’d imagine the user wish list for additions and fixes to Cubase is already MASSIVE, and getting into dead platform projects from the 1990s is likely to be way down at the bottom of the list.

A few of us are willing to help if a user doesn’t mind trusting us to convert the data, or teach them hacks to do it themselves. When I see it happen I’ll reach out to them in private with various solutions and tools I know of. If users don’t find help here…the next places to try are forums and user groups that specialize in dealing with ‘retro/legacy’ kit topics. People out there do still maintain and run ‘old kit’, and absolutely ENJOY helping people solve their preservation, archival, and conversion problems.

15

Oh yeah. I have quite the collection myself. In some regards, it’d be fun to tackle old dilemmas that people encounter but I just don’t have the time.

16

Folks at Steinberg probably feel the same way. In 2026, getting into 20 year old files from dead platforms is not a problem that comes up very often anymore. It’s even likely that the people who know how to do it have long retired. They might not even have the ‘rights to use’ whatever dev tools they were using back then, stuff that isn’t even available and supported anymore, stuff that might even require dongles and other long defunct security protocols that their rights to use went bye-bye a long time ago…the kinds of things that require more fussing with lawyers and drawing up contracts to get permission than it’s worth this late in the game.

It is ‘frustrating’, but it also happens all the time…with pretty much any software developer that’s been around a long time and done so many generations of software for so many different platforms.

Learning experience…always export projects into some open standard formats before putting a project to bed if at all possible.