My 5.25" floppy drive and power source came today, so I've been tinkering this evening attempting to image some Atari 8-bit disks from the big boxes I have buried in a cupboard upstairs.
After a few frightening mechanical noises and some initial frustrations — the most annoying of which by far was discovering I had the floppy drive cable inserted into the Greaseweazle the wrong way around, causing the drive to perpetually spin and never actually read anything — I got the setup up and running, and successfully ripped a couple of disks, initially to the "raw flux" .scp format, and then converted them to the more commonly used (for emulators, MiSTer and suchlike) .atr.
(For future reference, Atari disks are 40 tracks, meaning you need to set Greaseweazle to read cylinders 0-34 and 35-39. I don't know the technicalities behind this, but it worked.)
My initial success was reassuring, but I had a number of failures after that. I think some of these disks may be beyond help — and frustratingly, so far it appears to be the disks with more "personal" contents.
I attempted to rip a disk that had some of my brother's early BASIC programming experiments on it (including a simple multi-choice adventure game called Treasures of Crylos that I remember being rather fond of), but the disk barely registered as having any contents at all when I attempted to rip it.
I had a little more success with "Pete's Disk 1", which was a SpartaDOS X-formatted double-density disk, so a bit of an unusual edge case. The disk seemingly ripped successfully, and loading it into an emulator with SpartaDOS X installed allowed me to view the disk directory, but I was unable to actually load and run anything from the disk. So close! So very close. Also man, SpartaDOS X could fit a hell of a lot of stuff on one floppy disk. No wonder my Dad set me up with it for my personal disks rather than trusty old DOS 2.5. You can squeeze a lot more on when your file sizes are measured in bytes rather than sectors.
Other successes I had included what we colloquially referred to as "The Dutch Demo", a multi-part graphics and sound demo that is, unsurprisingly, Dutch (and I don't think I've ever seen archived anywhere online, so I will be sharing that at some point); Red Rat's Technicolour Dream Demo, which is a slideshow of pictures produced with the software in question, which supported considerably higher colour depth than the Atari was "supposed" to support; and a couple of disks of collected games.
I haven't started ripping and organising in any great depth yet, but I would like to rip as many of these as I can, then archive them somewhere online. While most of the software on these disks is archived via other means elsewhere around the Internet, it's the little things, like the menu systems used to collect these games together, and the specific combination of things on each disk, which is unique to my own computing history — and something that I'm keen to preserve if at all possible.
I don't know how many of these disks are going to be salvageable. I'm already seeing that some brands of disk have much better longevity than others — thus far, Radio Shack and Verbatim's disks have had the highest success rate, with Wabash being the worst — so it will be interesting to find out exactly how much I might be able to recover and (re)discover throughout this process.
I'm done for the evening, though. Back to it on Friday, since tomorrow is a Work Trip. A fun Work Trip, but still one I have to get up early and catch a train for, so I better get some sleep.
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