5 ms·

Ah, man - I also recently dug up the disks for the first non-trivial game I wrote, aged 11 or so - but they were all sadly damaged by decades of sitting in a da

Ah, man - I also recently dug up the disks for the first non-trivial game I wrote, aged 11 or so - but they were all sadly damaged by decades of sitting in a damp barn. It started as a galaga style evade-the-enemy ships side-scroller, then turned into a lunar lander type affair, which then metamorphosed into a wizball style pickup/power up romp across an alien planet, where you had to get your astronauts to the base before you ran out of air. I vaguely recall it had something to do with “Only You Can Save Mankind”. Deluxe Paint III, AMOS, three floppies, scored it myself, went mad with AMOS speech synthesis, and when I was finally done with my masterwork, watching my kid sister enthusiastically play it for hours on end was awesome. Then my parents sold my Amiga at a yard sale, and the disks just gathered mould and rust from then on. You know, I don’t know if I’ve put that much passion into anything since.

philpem 7y ago
Thing is, those disks can probably be recovered. Remove the disc 'biscuit' from the plastic shell or jacket and wash it in warm soapy water. Rinse it and dry it out. If that doesn't get them clean, try isopropanol. Then transplant the disc into a new shell or jacket. Use a good drive (Teac counts), clean the heads first, and read the disc in one shot -- you may well only get one try. Ideally use a Discferret, Catweasel or similar flux-level reader. This assumes they're not Wabash or some similarly junky brand. For those, you'll need a sacrifice to the data gods and a whole heap of luck... not to mention a box of foam swabs and isopropanol to clean the disk drive up afterwards... If you see bits of magnetic material flaking off the disc, don't even waste your time trying it. It's toast and will just end up fouling the heads on the drive. In theory hard-drive-style non-contact reading is possible, but I'm not aware of anyone who's actually done it.

philpem 7y ago

Thing is, those disks can probably be recovered. Remove the disc 'biscuit' from the plastic shell or jacket and wash it in warm soapy water. Rinse it and dry it out. If that doesn't get them clean, try isopropanol. Then transplant the disc into a new shell or jacket. Use a good drive (Teac counts), clean the heads first, and read the disc in one shot -- you may well only get one try. Ideally use a Discferret, Catweasel or similar flux-level reader. This assumes they're not Wabash or some similarly junky brand. For those, you'll need a sacrifice to the data gods and a whole heap of luck... not to mention a box of foam swabs and isopropanol to clean the disk drive up afterwards... If you see bits of magnetic material flaking off the disc, don't even waste your time trying it. It's toast and will just end up fouling the heads on the drive. In theory hard-drive-style non-contact reading is possible, but I'm not aware of anyone who's actually done it.