

The Geeks Who Saved Prince of Persia’s Source Code From Digital Death - peteforde
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/04/prince-of-persia-source-code/?pid=2480&viewall=true

======
jcr
For those reluctantly remembering that stack of _your_ old floppies and
wondering how much of a pain it would be to attempt recovering your data from
them...

<http://www.softpres.org/glossary:KryoFlux>

~~~
JunkDNA
Am I reading this right that I can take a "standard" 3.5" floppy from a PC,
hook it into this board, and it will read my old Amiga formatted disks?? I
thought this was impossible to do with modern drives. Anyone know how this
gets around all, the crazy hacks Amiga drives could do? I'm not a hardware
guy, so I don't fully understand the issue. I just know I have shoeboxes full
of unlabeled floppies in the basement that I would love to preserve.

~~~
vyadh
It works because it is itself a floppy controller - it doesn't go through your
PC. It has complete control - just like the Amiga did! :)

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zandorg
A few months ago, I found some C64 5 1/4 inch disks in my Mum's loft. I didn't
need "crates of Apple II's", just a 1541 drive from Ebay and a XA1541 cable to
connect to my laptop's parallel port.

I worked out a system whereby I'd read a disk, then when the drive head got
magnetic filth on it, I'd swab the disk head with isopropyl alcohol.

Anyway, I recovered about 1/2 of the disks with no errors, recovering 4 short
stories - thought lost forever - and 52 Boulderdash 4 caves I did with a
friend. Also, a sampler/sequencer.

My point is that the C64's 1541 disk drive has its own ROM, so you don't need
a C64 to read its disks!

~~~
vidarh
If you want to try recovering the rest, keep in mind the 1541 is notorious for
losing head alignment. For 1541's that's been used a lot you can pretty safely
assume that it won't be properly aligned, but even if it was, chances are your
disks were last written by a 1541 that wasn't perfectly aligned...

Look up how to adjust it, and chances are you'll be able to recover a good
chunk of the rest. The "crude" approach is to just manually try adjusting the
alignment screw, but there are proper instructions online and software to aid
finding the right alignment.

(and the 1541 didn't have just it's own ROM - it has it's own 6502 CPU - it's
as powerful as the C64 itself... And you can download programs to it over the
serial port)

~~~
zandorg
Have you got the URL of any websites that offer such an alignment tool?
Preferably done using PC software and the XA1541 cable.

~~~
vidarh
No, sorry it's been years and years since I had any disks. But there's any
number of guides available for doing it "manually" as well. For example (PDF):
[http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/re/Tuning%20the%201541%20...](http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/re/Tuning%20the%201541%20\(1285\).pdf)

The software tools don't replace manual adjustments - all most of them do is
to try to give you some indicator whether you're getting closer or not but you
can achieve that simply by attempting to load files and look for / listen for
signs the drive is attempting to re-read the same track more or less often as
well. Read errors has a pretty characteristic sound on the 1541.

------
octoham
I made quite a few games back on my Amiga with AMOS (and even one in C -
though much less advanced). Used to play them with my brothers. This was pre-
internet and before I'd even heard of BBS's so only 3 or 4 people ever saw
them and no copies exist, unless... I still have several billion floppies in
boxes at my parents place and I'd love to trawl through and see what I can dig
up. Very tempted to put aside a week later this year and see what I can find.

While I'm sure nothing I created could be compared to Prince of Persia, I
cannot be certain :)

Unfortunately though, Github doesn't list AMOS in their languages. Major
omission if you ask me...

~~~
vidarh
There's still a decent sized Amiga community online, so if you find anything
interesting, the people over at amiga.org, amigaworld.net and eab.abime.net
(English Amiga Board) would probably love to hear about it.

The latter is the most creatively oriented, with quite a few people actively
interested in archival and recovery "even" of amateur/unfinished stuff.

There's a very popular thread there about PD/freeware games, and they've
recovered quite a few previously unreleased or games that were thought lost,
and even gotten hold of the source code for quite a bit of it. And there are
some AMOS fans there too.

There's bound to be someone there that'd volunteer to help recover the data on
your floppies as well, if you need assistance.

------
sp332
This is probably a good place to remind people that any old floppies you have
sitting around have almost certainly deteriorated, and that there are people
who want to recover and save them for you.
<http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191>

------
Luc
Check out the discussion on Metafilter, especially seanmpuckett's posts about
how RW18 squeezed 180% of the normal capacity onto a disk:
<http://www.metafilter.com/114962/jmp-TRIGSPIKES#4303936>

------
rwmj
Assuming in 20 years time we're not all wondering what happened to github ...

~~~
sophacles
This is a good point. I do however like to think that with the internet things
are a bit different. Look for example at the project to archive Geocities when
its end of life was announced. And the internet archive project. When there is
simple access to this stuff, those with archivist gene[1] and some interest in
the subject have a tendency to keep it available.

[1] a joke gene some of my friends and I deduced, it imparts a deep yearning
to collect things, not just collections though, complete, well sorted
collections.

