about archiving original games/programs

[prowler]

Originally Posted by Loedown

If you'd asked me this question some few years back, I would have sold you my boxed and never used 8" NEC drive, which was shipped off to France for the owner of a Fairlight CMI synth.

Paul

Hmm... I think the 8" drives I saw for sale in those Micro Mart adverts were NEC.

[DH]

http://cgi.ebay.ca/Shugart-801-8-inc...3%3A1|294%3A50

Bit pricey though + the shipping costs will take it way beyond it's real value

[prowler]

Originally Posted by DemonHellraiser

http://cgi.ebay.ca/Shugart-801-8-inc...3%3A1|294%3A50

Yes, that looks like the drive I remember - same black front too (the Motorola development system had two of them). You're right about the price, though!

Edit: The OP needn't have worried about whether his query was off topic - we've soon got it back on topic.

[DH]

Well, you have 9 days & 11 hours to decide and/or convince the wife/girlfriend, if you have one, that it's the best thing since sliced bread and you absolutely need it Good luck mate on your decision

[Supamax]

Originally Posted by prowler

I still have some 8-inch (160kB?) floppies (real big ones! )

I still have one, too!
About the drive, I don't think it used the actual interface (with 34 pins). Am I wrong?

[prowler]

Originally Posted by DemonHellraiser

Well, you have 9 days & 11 hours to decide and/or convince the wife/girlfriend, if you have one, that it's the best thing since sliced bread and you absolutely need it Good luck mate on your decision

Thanks! Let's hope that will give me enough time to find a UK supplier.

Originally Posted by Supamax

I still have one, too!
About the drive, I don't think it used the actual interface (with 34 pins). Am I wrong?

No you're not wrong, but it's a relatively simple task to convert it.

[DH]

Originally Posted by prowler

Thanks! Let's hope that will give me enough time to find a UK supplier.

I hope you find a UK supplier soon and at a much more competitive and easy going price too

[prowler]

Originally Posted by DemonHellraiser

I hope you find a UK supplier soon and at a much more competitive and easy going price too

I'll certainly try. I may even have kept a copy of one of those adverts somewhere just as a reminder of what was still available then.

[DH]

@prowler
If you successfully get an 8" Floppy drive and working on your peecee, give us a post and let us know what secrets lie on your disks. I'm only curios to know what you may have, of course, this is dependant on whether the drive works with the peecee and if the disks can be read.

[demoniac]

Originally Posted by DemonHellraiser

Hmm. As we already know, a lifespan of a Video tape is around 50 years (Stored) So I would presume it's roughly the same with a floppy, depending on how much it has been used and subjected to the elements.

According to the article that SPS refers to it's 10 years and up to 30 years with special care.
http://web.archive.org/web/200205220...l98/media.html

[prowler]

@DemonHellRaiser:

I haven't found the disks yet, but I do still have them.

They were formatted with an OS called MDOS (Motorola Disk Operating System). None of them are originals, but some are copies of original disks which were supplied for use with the development system sometime between 1977 and 1979, though the copies I have were probably made in June 1987 just before I changed jobs.

There were BASIC Interpreter, Macro Assembler and FORTRAN Compiler disks, as well as another couple or three which had copies of some programs I had written and text files with notes about the programs.

This was all good stuff at the time, which I was soon to find out.

My new job involved writing assember programs with an Intel 8080 development system (never anything up to date!), and these programs were stored on punched tapes!

I do have one another 8" disk which is from that period. It was used with a word processor and probably contains copies of the manuals I had written for some of the equipment we had designed and were manufacturing.

I still have hard copy listings of most of the stuff somewhere too.

[Eclipse]

Originally Posted by s2325

Yes, you can store adfs on DVD but I think after years there will be no way to write them back on floppy disks.

Not all originals can be ADF'd.

[mr.vince]

Originally Posted by Eclipse

Not all originals can be ADF'd.

True. But there are alternatives, e.g. IPF. Any format that

a) saves all information present on the media
b) verifies integrity of the data
c) verifies the authenticy of the data

(read: can recreate the information present on the source bit for bit (in terms of flux data), including any anomalies like weak bits and others)

can be used for long term preservation.

Making RAW dumps of whatever data you want to archive is a good start (as long as you really store ALL information present on the source). And: whatever format you derive from it, KEEP the raw data. Just in case...

While we have archived many disks, we're still missing quite some paper (manuals, code wheels etc.). So people caring about preservation of their games should also scan the box and all the materials that came with it. This is hard work, as scanning manuals and pdf-ing them really can be very time consuming.

[prowler]

Originally Posted by DemonHellraiser

I hope you find a UK supplier soon and at a much more competitive and easy going price too

I've found the UK supplier of 8-inch floppy drives whose adverts I remember from years ago, and they still sell them! Prices are a bit steep now, though.

http://www.distel.co.uk

And here's the 8-inch floppy disk drives they have available: