Slashdot Mirror
Retrieving Data From Old Amstrad Floppies?
Jeppe Utzon writes "Back in 1987, when I was a teenager in high school still, I spent most evenings, nights and weekends writing small programs in BASIC on my Amstrad CPC 6128. Some of these programs were simple games, some drew graphics, some could help me with math or train me in French — and most were utterly pointless. But I never had as much satisfying fun as when writing those programs — even if no one in my family understood any of it when I proudly displayed the fruits of three sleepless nights of labor. Now, 20 years later, I still have a sealed pack of about 15 disks with all my work on them (along with a few of my favorite games) and I was wondering if it was possible to get the data out somehow so that I could run it in emulation on my Mac. I know of the emulators, but have no clue what would be needed to extract the data — or if it is even extractable after all these years. I realize the chances of the data still being intact are quite low, but I'd like to give it a shot. So if anyone has any pointers it would be greatly appreciated."
A large hurdle will be finding a drive to read the Amstrad disks at all.
I'm sure that will be the problem. Unless you search on Ebay or Craigslist for someone with one in their basement....good luck. I have a 5 1/4 floppy drive and some disks set aside for the exact same reason.....someday I'll want that info and then I'll be all set.
WTF? Over?
Otherwise you're pretty boned.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I used disk2fdi for this. You can get this at: http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi
Fixed that for ya.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
Have a ton of old code, writings, etc. on 3.5" disks -- I had the brains to copy over the 5.25" data back when I had an Apple, apparently.
//gs and all the stuff that comes with it and have it around the house, and am not even sure how to get all of these files to PC or BSD-friendly formats. Some are text. Some are Appleworks.
// 3.5" disks.
I don't really want to go buy a retro
I copied over everything I had on a Mac platform, but didn't have a SuperDrive, so couldn't read the
Anyone up for a LAN party where we all convert our old stuff to current formats?
Archiving was easier when everything was in universal formats. (No MS-XML formats for me.)
technical writing / development
In addition to the usual hapless corporate customers needing to restore 10 year old backup tapes at the request of lawyers, forensic data recoverers can now market to nostalgic boomers looking to relive their C64 and Sinclair ZX-80 experiences.
There is big money here - look at the motorcycle industry, which used to be pitched to outlaws, kids, and the outdoorsy, and is now aiming for the Viagra and $100-bottle-of-wine crowd.
I still have a huge library of Fortran code on 1/2" tape. If I ever want to see that code again will somebody please kill me.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Google found me this emulation site. So emulation seems possible. Dunno about a Mac port, but people are writing code to emulate.
As for getting the data off, my first idea was to try to find a full system off of eBay. Then you'll need to write something to pull raw sectors off the disks. And a terminal program - something to push the info down a serial line. On the other side hook up your Mac and write something there to collect the data.
I'm doing something similar with an old Amiga 2000 and my old programming projects.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Yes, because VMWare will totally help you run a system that originally ran on a Z80, and used utterly non-standard disks which no other drive will accept.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Use the google.... I'm sure there's a way.. I also had the same nostalgia, but from years before that on the ZX81. Lots of emulators for that, including hooking up a tape recorder to my iMac to get the programs off! Lots of good fun there.
Good luck..
Well VMware is pretty damn awesome.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
It should be trivially easy to do, given a short BASIC program and five minutes on ebay.
Just search ebay for an Amstrad CPC6128 or a Sinclair Spectrum +3 or an Amstrad PCW. There are still plenty of them around. (I have a Spectrum +3 with a working 3 inch Amstrad floppy drive as it happens, the floppy drive is quite handy for restoring the firmware on the Spectrum ethernet card I'm developing if I blow some non-functional code onto the flash ROM and can't reprogram it any more over ethernet). It would be best to get a CPC6128 - if you get a Spectrum +3 or a PCW you may have to write some low-level software to read CPC formatted discs.
The CPC, if I remember right, has an RS232 port. Write a short BASIC program to send your data to a PC via RS232.
Incidentally, the most common fault on the 3 inch Amstrad drives is a broken belt - you can buy new ones from rwap software: http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/ - while this firm caters for the Spectrum, since the later models were built by Amstrad with the 3in drive, they carry parts for 3in drives.
The other good news is most floppies seem to hold up well - while the 3in discs don't seem to do as well as 5.25 in discs (I have only one faulty disc in many 20+ year old ones for my BBC micro, but rather more faulty 3in discs - all pre-recorded game discs) - so I suspect your discs will all read fine.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
You can start here...
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/amstrad/
A quick google search found this site. Helpful?
We'll make great pets
There are a number of companies that do media conversion. They can read old floppies, 9-track tapes, tape cartridges and other obsolete media.
Try:
http://computer-convert.com/index.htm
http://www.vintagetech.com/?section=conversion (they also do 7-track tape, paper tape and punch cards!)
Google: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=media+conversion+floppy+tape+&src=IE-SearchBox
However, you may find looking on ebay is cheaper and more fun.
Floppy-wise, they used a non-standard 3" drive, which may have been made by Shugart. That's going to be the real hurdle.
My own Amstrad lasted me through to my college years, when I used to use it to solve physics problems. My favorite was getting it to calculate anomalous Zeeman effect splitting profiles.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Easy, I have a standard 5 1/4 drive on my CPC6128. I even did the little hack to invert A and B so now my |A drive is the 5 1/4.
There is tools in cpm+ to use 800k floppy or transfer files etc. And it uses the same encoding (MFM?) on Amstrad or PC so on the CPC you can read and write PC floppy. PC use 40 tracks by default and Amstrad use 80 tracks for the 800k floppy iirc. Anyway, it works, try to find the schematic to hook a 3 1/2 or 5 1/4 drive on an Amstrad.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Amstrad issued two RS-232-C D25 serial interfaces, attached to the expansion connector at the rear of the machine, with a through-connector for the CPC464 disk drive or other peripherals. The original interface came with a "Book of Spells" for facilitating data transfer between other systems using a proprietary protocol in the device's own ROM, as well as terminal software to connect to British Telecom's Prestel service. A separate version of the ROM was created for the U.S. market due to the use of the commands "SUCK" and "BLOW", which were considered unacceptable there. Use a serial line to copy the data. I'm sure that it wouldn't be too hard if you can just get a machine that works.
As I'm not a betting man, I would still have to say your chances of getting the discs to read after 21 years aren't very good. Not knowing what conditions they have been exposed to, it's really hard to say what to expect. Magnetic media can have a good shelf life in the right conditions (away from magnetic fields, heat,etc..)
Best of luck though. If you manage to get your programs, maybe you could post them on sourceforge!
Sprinkle the disks with iron filings and scan them on a flatbed scanner. Then write a new and absolutely pointless program to retrieve the data from the scans.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Then that is not the amstrad I was thinking of. The Amstrad I was thinking of was DOS based and had a 8088 in it. I don't even know if VMware will run a 8 bit system anyway. It was just a guess.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
If you get desperate, there are data recovery services you can hire (at pretty ridiculous expense I'm sure) that can retrieve data from busted hard drives and floppies. Given that they have to do things like mount naked platters and floppies and read them as-is, it seems likely that their gear can accomodate a range of different sizes and sector layouts and whatnot.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
I've attempted to read 10-year-old 3.5" floppies and had pretty bad luck. The magnetic media became unreadable, at least on my standard equipment (which I tested and works just fine with fresh media). Perhaps a sophisticated lab could get the data off, but I sure couldn't. You may find that your disks are unreadable by now, even if you had equipment capable of reading them.
Just sign up for one of these (I suggest cctalk) and ask around. Maybe somebody can convert them for you, maybe somebody else has an entire Amstrad system that they'll let you have cheap.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
read amstrad cpc disks on a pc
onto google :)
http://www.google.pt/search?hl=pt-PT&q=read+amstrad+cpc+disks+on+a+pc&btnG=Pesquisa+do+Google&meta=
Anyone know where I can get an old NeXT optical disc converted to a PC-accessible modern format?
I googled around, sent emails and filled in 'contact us' forms on a number of archive-retrieval websites and never got any response back.
http://www.pcwking1.netfirms.com/disc-conversions.html
Well there you go then. Problem solved. Here are a couple of free sarcasm tags for you too.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
It is possible to connect an Amstrad 3" floppy drive to a PC computer. Both CPCs and PC computers use the same type of floppy disk controller. You can get a suitable drive by purchasing an old Amstrad PCW word processor device. Here is one application for reading the disk format on a Windows system:
http://www.cpcmania.com/cpcdiskxp/cpcdiskxp.htm
Several other similar tools exist.
Here are instructions on connecting a 3" drive to a PC:
http://www.amstradcg.nl/econvers.html#3PC
In my case we had an Amstrad PCW8256 in full working order, so that covered reading the disks. The Locolink software is hard to come by but I picked up a copy on E-Bay. It's designed for transferring and converting Locoscript files but will transfer other files as well just fine. It only works with Window 98 on the PC side though.
If you don't have an actual working Amstrad then your best bet is probably finding a hacked-up 3" drive that you can connect to a PC. You might be more likely to be able to purchase the whole computer.
If you're in the UK there are services that will transfer the files for you for 10GBP a disk. Here's a list of them. In the US, try here.
Good luck!
and independently wealthy, you can contact Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They are the folks who amazingly recovered the data off a hard drive from the shuttle Columbia wreckage. Based on that performance, the Amstrad diskettes would be a breeze for them.
Invenio via vel creo
There was a pcw to pc copy cable and software can't remember its name the DOS end of it was pretty crappy, basically serial transfer, so slow. :-)
Find an old Amstrad pcw word processor more common than the cpc 6128 and can read the disks and then the challenge is to find the cable (easy to make) and software(hard to find).
I did this many years ago to get someone's book off a Amstrad they had spent years writing on one, obviously the publisher couldn't read the disk so I was asked to help.
The main problem you may find is the rubber belts on the drives themselves loose there spring and then the drive doesn't spin at the right speed and doesn't read. Invest in a large selection of elastic bands
We managed to find someone willing to sell the software, cable and an old pcw to do the job, several donor pcw's and elastic bands later and it was transferred.
It might be easier to find a Amstad enthusiast who still has the kit to do it for you.
G
Even though I never had an Amstrad to recover disks from, I somewhat regret not having bought one of the three or four I saw at thrift stores over the years. As long as the interface is compatible with the standard Shugart interface (which it should be), you could hook it up to a Catweasel card. I did buy a few Amstrad disks when I found them (they were small), but by the time I cared, I didn't see any more of the computers.
But I was a TRS-80 guy back in the day, so all my old disks are already imaged thanks to the Catweasel. And thanks to Radio Shack using standard FM/MFM disk controller chips. (I've also played around with code to read Apple II and Commodore disks, and Commodore's GCR doesn't re-sync very well.)
Basically, there were three 3" formats back in the day fighting for who would be the next floppy drive. There was one which got used by some typewriters and the Famicom Disk System, another which got used by the Amstrad, and... the Sony 3 1/2" disk which got used by Apple and HP at about the same time in 1983-1984.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I just got the feeling that this guy's story is too cozy and perfect . . . the kind of thing we are likely to relate to . . . I say this guy is some consultant somewhere trying to charge someone an arm and a leg for doing this while at the same time trying to get us to do his homework for him . . . for free . . .
Just the drive (got an old AT style PC) here: Ebay!
I don't know what kind of interface the 3" drives have, but if it is or can be adapted to the usual 34-pin SA400-style interface then one of the Catweasel floppy controllers (made by Jens Schoenfeld A.K.A. Individual Computers) might be your friend. They can make reading almost any format a Simple Matter Of Programming(TM).
And don't listen to people telling you the media deteriorate. The older the better, really -- I've lost data on 3.5" floppies more and more lately (quality seems to be going down), but my old 8" and 5.25" disks read just fine. Same with 1/2" tape -- if only the drives were as reliable as the tapes.
If a floppy is properly stored and kept indoors, it should still be readable after all that time. I have some TRS-80 floppies from the early '80s which read just fine a couple of years ago with a Catweasel board. There were some read errors, but those were probably there back in the day. So 25 years is certainly not unreasonable.
But it's still not too hard to find 5 1/4" floppy drives in relatively good condition. Good luck finding an Amstrad drive. Is there even an Amstrad users group in the US?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
you could perhaps write a program on a working machine with the old 3'' FDD to output the bytes from a file to any available serial/parallel ports. ;)
My old PCW8256 has the old 3'' form factor FDD, but is currently up in the loft, so I can't be too sure, but I believe that whilst there are no serial ports on it, there is a port for the printer that came bundled with it. Assuming that the printer port is indeed a parallel port, albeit perhaps in a different form factor, (i.e DIN instead of DB25), you could build a custom cable to link the data pins on the old machine, to any more modern machine that had a parallel port, then write software to run on the modern machine, to receive the data transmitted. A serial link could also be possible.
If the old machine has no output ports, but has a multi-tone speaker, you could even write code to emit a different tone from the machine for each character, or byte of information that is read from a given file, record it, then write the code to 'decode' it on a more modern machine, having inputted the sound, as say, a wav file.
You could even get the old machine to emit different colours or flash the screen, record that with a webcam, and get the data across that way, slow and complicated, but doable.
I'll be interested to see what other suggestions are given, as no doubt I'm making this horribly overcomplicated
I've always kept odd stuff in boxes, knowing that one day there'd be someone like you yelling out for one. Once I get the kids to bed I'll start rummaging through them umpteen boxes.... BRB
My Amstrad had a standard audio tape deck, not floppies... That sure made it easy to copy software: just pop it in your dual-tape boombox. ;)
I'm still trying to find something compatible with my 8 inch Wang, so far the only thing available is Cowboy Neils mom.
My first programming was on punched paper tape, which I can still read. I am not saying I have a machine that could read it, but at least I can look at the punches and figure out what the characters were.
When I was in grad school, there was some data stored on punched paper tape, stored fan-folded. The tape had dried out and cracked where the folds were. (The cracks would be in the middle of a byte, especially a high one, as they would have more holes punched in them.) They wanted to save the data, so they hired a under-grad to spend all summer sending the tape through a reader, one 4 foot section at a time, figure out what the byte was where the crack was, type that in, and then proceed to the next 4 foot section. I still think that that must have been the worst IT job ever.
The Amstrad PCW, Amstrad CPC and Sinclair Spectrum used the same disk drives. For example Level 9 published triple-format (!) disk versions of their adventure games that could be played on all the above. If you're looking to buy a second-hand computer to read your disks, this may increase your options.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
PHHHT!
I have some of my first BASIC programs that I wrote -using my high school's PDP 8- on punched paper tape and the old Bell 212 terminal to go with it.
Now get off my lawn, damnit!
Sig this!
Amstrad did make some IBM PC compatibles, but that'd be too easy - IIRC, they used standard (well, as standard as you can call it back then) 360 kiB 5.25" floppies, too.
And, all VMware does is virtualization (not emulation) of an x86 PC.
This guy needs to find a working Amstrad that can read his disks, and then use it to create disk images. I don't know if there's a utility to automatically do that for the Amstrads, though. (For Apple IIs, it's stupid easy to make disk images, thanks to ADTPro and cheap serial cables.)
LAN party at noon, then pubcrawling to midnight engaging the opposite sex?
technical writing / development
Your best bet would be to go native and get yourself one of the old Amstrad on Ebay France (or UK). http://search.ebay.fr/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=amstrad&category0=
Just to be snarky for a moment, the Z80 *was* a clone of the Intel 8080...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Try emailing the people who write those emulators you mention.
No sig today...
Yes, but does your modern PC...?
>"rather more faulty 3in discs - all pre-recorded
> game discs"
If you saw how they duplicated those disks you wouldn't be very surprised...
No sig today...
Oh how I wish I hadn't thrown away my Amstrad CPC 464 three years ago, or I would have been able to actually help. I had an external 3" disc drive that was connectable to a PC in lieu of a 3½ floppy.
There just wasn't any way I was going to be able to get it back to the US from my parents' attic in Britain and I didn't have time to dispose of it properly on eBay, so off to the skip it went.
I feel sad.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
Amstrad put the disk drive on the Spectrum after they bought the company but the Spectrum was already in its death throes. I doubt they sold more than a few dozen of them.
No sig today...
Ask about on Usenet - comp.sys.amstrad.8bit, and on CPCZone http://www.cpczone.net/ and look on the CPC Wiki http://www.cpcwiki.com/index.php/Main_Page.
.dsk file on the PC.
People there have working CPCs, and setups to get disk images from the CPC into a
keep looking on ebay for an old cpc 6128 or PCW-8256 or PCw-8512 (they all had the same 3" Hitachi microdrive). You can probably pick one up for like 10 uk pounds or something,
The Hitachi 3" Microdrive which was intended to be a direct competitor to Sony's 3.5" format. (Unfortunately for Amstrad the Sony format was the one that won-out in the PC world). Because of that I'm guessing the possibility that the 3" Microdrive has a PC-compatable connector may be high (but I don't know for sure).
Of course even if you got the drive connected to your PC OK still the problem would still be to get your PC to recognise the AMSDOS file system on the floppy.
I guess another option (if you get your hands on an amstrad computer) would be to write some little program that implements a simple file transfer protocol via whatever ports (RS-232 etc) that are available on the amstrad you get, then connect it directly to a regular PC via a homebrew cable.
Ask SPS team http://www.softpres.org/
They already developed 3" drive interface:
http://www.softpres.org/article:hard:connect_3inch_drive_to_amiga
My first computer was a 286 running DOS, so I'm not in quite as much trouble WRT finding machinery to read my old code. That being said though, I've been religiously bringing my old data forward as different storage formats have become obsolete. My 5.25" disks got copied to single-sided 3.5", then dual sided 3.5", then CDs (briefly) Zip Disks and now I'm in the process of moving my archives to DVD. I'll be amazed if any of this crap is ever of interest to anyone but me, but I find it fun to go back from time to time and revisit some of my old favorite games and (terrible) code I wrote as a kid.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
and if you try, you'll ruin your fond memories. I've done it a few times and have been thoroughly disappointed. Like any self-respecting computer geek I frequented the bulletin boards before Al Gore invented the Internet. I'd play co-op text adventure games with friends and be online for the majority of my waking time. I had a chance to buy one of the BBS' I would play on and I tried to get some old friends to get back with me so we could relish in the glory days. It was awkward, not that much fun, and really ruined my memories of the fun I'd had. Just enjoy your fond memories and don't try to recreate the situation/atmosphere/fun you had as a younger person. You'll be disappointed.
If I remember rightly the drives were integrated into some models of Amstrads. Given this if you can find an old Amstrad you should see if you could create a serial link between the computer and your Mac. After that its a matter of using kermit or some other serial transfer protocol.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Well I'll be! I always thought that Z80 sticker meant it came with a copy of Zork 8.0 :-)
Glad I never got one. I would have been SO pissed!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I have long since thrown out my commie64. I had roughly 200 5 1/4 floppies loaded with c64 games and other apps. I was hoping to sell them on ebay. But my parents tossed out the floppies a few weeks ago.
now all I have left is that old star micronics dot matrix printer for c64.
I need to get rid of that thing.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Snarky or not, you're wrong. The Z80 was backwards compatible with the 8080 instruction set, but it had a lot of it's own changes and extensions. Z80 code will likely not run on an 8080.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I copied my old Atari ST floppies (DD 3.5") to MOD for archiving. About 5 years after writing, a significant fraction had errors and some were unreadable. I expect that for most of these you will need professional data recovery that can read analog and to advances DSP vodoo to recover the data.
If you find a working drive and manage to get information about the encoding, you can also build your own read amplifier and digitizer (or buy one, warning, not cheap for the speed required) and try the DSP yourself.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Wikipedia disagrees with you. It was designed to be binary compatible with the 8080, but it added significant features such that the binary compatibility would not go in the other direction.
In any case it's utterly irrelevant because x86 is not binary compatible with the 8080, so even if the Z80 were a perfect clone of the 8080 VMWare still wouldn't be able to run it.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
I would go to a university and see if they have old equipment for just this kind of reason, the university I go to has video equipment that date decades back for the same sort of reason as you. The cool thing is they can transfer any format to any format, so if you want that beta on a blu-ray, you got it.
eBay has 2 listings for the needed floppy drives, here and here, but they aren't cheap.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
I looked into this a while ago, I have a few CF2 3" disks, and would love to read what I wrote when I was 14.
I found this company that offers conversions @ £5 a disk.
This isn't the only company, but a google will find the others.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
I have an 8" disk from the IBM Displaywriter system that my mom used in 1981. I'd love to see what's on it -- I'm pretty sure it contains some embarrassingly bad stuff I wrote for high school.
Now you 5.25-inch kids get off my lawn.
What's the density on it? Could you just sprinkle some iron filings on the bare disk and take a picture?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
IRCC the drives can be connected to the same controller that can use a 5 1/4 drive.
Dunnow if this helps:
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/retrocomputer/3INCHWEB.htm
There are definately some utils to look at esp, around the older emulators.
Another way is via a parrellel cable from a working CPC I think.
Z80? That's the CPU my Timex-Sinclair 1000 used. I didn't know the Amstrads still used it in 1987! 1987 was the year I bought the (used, of course) IBM-XT and started hacking its hardware.
I learned Z-80 assembly and hand-assembled machine code for the TS-1000 (around 1982), because I wanted a battle tanks game and the chip only ran at 1.5 mz (iirc) and it basically controled every system on the machine.
My tanks game was awesome! Two people could play it at the same time, playing each other, both using the keyboard which had no actual keys. I'm still proud of that a quarter century later!
Of course, the Z80 was a whole lot simpler than an x86. But then again I'm a whole lot simpler than later model people are.
Ah, memory lane. Such sweet memories... oh shit I was still married then, WTF am I thinking? Good old days, my ass!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Oh yeah, and your floppy drive probably needs a controller. And controllers from that era generally plug into PCs with ISA slots. Do you have either?
A while back, a fellow by the name of John Titor had this exact same problem, only with a 70s vintage IBM machine.
I'm sure if you search slashdot or the web at large for "John Titor" you'll find his solution.
So the problem is, how to read the strange 3 inch Amstrad floppy. And I have to think that another problem that other people who still have an Amstrad laying around in a collection somewhere have, is that they can no longer buy floppy media for it. And we now have the Internet, linking all of us geeky users together. Is there no one out there with an Amstrad that would be willing to accept floppy disks from other users, and read the data and transfer it to other media (most likely 1 CD for hundreds of floppies although other media options come to mind, including have the sender include a small flash drive), and in return the person with the Amstrad gets to keep the diskettes? Clearly the Amstrad would need to transfer data to a more modern system, but that should be a trivial problem to resolve.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I had much better luck recovering my 360k media than the other disks...90% or so. The higher up the density chain the lower the return rate :(
:(
:O
Got data stored on old tapes? XP doesn't do floppy and parallel interface tape drives very happily (altho it is possible with enough random drivers loaded)
Nor does XP want to do 360k drives
Think the OP is bad, i have a basic game stored on a 10MB Wang removable platter i would like to move...... 300lb of equipment and 2000w to play battleship anyone? Playable online if i ship ya a terminal and 300 baud modem. At least i have the drive/computer just not the power to turn it all on
Sounds interesting, good luck.
Measuring something like 9.5 x 18.5 x 4.5 cm. Also dug up some original Amstrad PLC disks; 07077 CP/M Plus and a 07076 LocoScript 2. Let me know where your dungeon lives... or where your bed sleeps. Sure we will be able to work something out, as I've been selling off stuff for the benefit of the International Campaign for Tibet for quite a couple of years now. [On eBay, yes...]
"...So if anyone has any pointers it would be greatly appreciated."
I got one...
foo = &bar;
The Amstrad PCW series computers have one or two 3" drives, use CP/M as operating system, and the best part is - they are still in use by a lot of people for their word processing needs, so there is still a thriving community (believe it or not) of people ready to help you out, as well as a few businesses selling spares for the PCW. I have the PCW8256, and after replacing the rubber belt in the drive, it works perfectly - just like new. These babies can be equipped with a 3.5" floppy drive, and also they have a serial interface. Either of these goodies should allow you to transfer your softwares, eventually, onto a more modern media.
Anyhow, I strongly recommend that you look into getting a PCW or getting in touch with someone who has one and will help you with this transfer.
Problem solved.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
http://search.ebay.com/Amstrad-floppy_W0QQ_trksidZm37QQfromZR40
$280+ for the drives... or $40 for a "laptop"
Wow! That's a BIG laptop. And ugly too.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
Perhaps there is something similar for the Amstrad.
Worst case scenario, find a person with an Amstrad, then list the program code and take pictures every page ...
Thus why I was being snarky. No, they're not really compatible. Close, but no cigar. Still, you could probably take a copy of BOCHS or DOSBox and modify it for Z80 compatibility without too much difficulty. The architecture would still be all wrong for an Amstrad, though... :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
after you've moved this stuff a few times from domicile to domicle.
Add a wife and a couple of kids, a garage full of tools and supplies (because the houses you buy need rennovations), and make sure it's you lugging the heavy boxes; suddenly, those old bits and pieces lose their glitter, and they go on Craigslist for free.
This sounds like the high school football players sitting in a bar, talking about their "glory days" rather than doing something interesting with their lives.
You can never go home again.
Using Google, I fouund the solution. It appears that this guy can do the conversion for you and return your data in hours. Cost would not be prohibitive and would support the Amstrad addiction.
He seems to have a pretty good handle on all the conversion problems, too. His page is a fun read just for that.
If you can't find a belt, O rings sometimes work pretty good too. If you can't find the right size, some hardware stores can custom make them. Kept our old VCR running for a long time ;)
When I learned programming on my BBC B, I wrote some programs out in a book until I got a printer! I still have some of them even now.
Pro Coffee Drinker
Definitely sounds like a Vegas kinda party.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
If you still have a headache you can take an asprin...
You can plug PC 3 1/2 or 5 1/4 drive on an Amstrad, they use the same interface!
Yup--Amstrad was one of the makers of oddball "semi-standard" PCs. It had standard serial ports that others like Atari and Commodore seemed averse to using on their 8-bit home computer lines (probably because they wanted to make it a hassle to use third-party peripherals--basically buy aour stuff, or buy an overpriced adapter to plug in standard stuff).
Amstrad CPCs not only had the same floppy controller and interface as the IBM PC, it also used the same 6845 video display processor as well (which is why it had CGA-like graphics, and the added 16-colour low-res mode like the Tandy 1000 series and PCJr). Sound was identical to the MSX-based computers. They basically cherry-picked here and there.
Too bad the use of a non-standard form factor drive with the standard connector had to happen though. What's this guy going to do with the old discs now? Fortunately for myself, I purchased a floppy drive for my Coleco ADAM the first opportunity I could because the modified cassette tapes were not all that reliable and they were hard to find. As a result all my old stuff ended up on floppies.
The Coleco floppy drive had a non-standard ADAMNet interface (ADAMNet worked just like USB but slower--you could plug the keyboard into the back of the disk drive, or the front "keyboard" port, or swap the floppy and keyboard wires and the damn thing would work). More importantly though, the disks were normal 5.25" floppies FORMATTED TO A STANDARD 160KB FORMAT READABLE ON IBM PCs. Eighteen years after we got the ADAM I was able to scrounge up a leftover 5.25" floppy drive, put it in my Linux box and use DD to make images of the floppies that work perfect with emulators!
Interestingly Atari kind of migrated towards less-proprietary architecture with its ST line too--ST computers had standard serial and parallel ports, and it used 3.5" floppies with a variant of FAT formatting that was readable on IBM PC drives.
I was laughed at by Commodore and Apple fans for going with "toy" Coleco and Atari computers, but in a sense I got the last laugh, because I ended up with computers that had amongst the most easily recoverable media of all those computers of that era. So why did I choose the Coleco and Atari ST computers back then? Becasue both could be easily made to run a variant of CP/M, including popular apps like Wordstar.
With a working Amstrad (with a working 3" drive) it's easy. All you need to do is (literally) hack it open and install a 3.5" floppy on its second drive (I think a standard PC floppy needs a bit of rewiring, but it's certainly possible). Then save the files to an Amstrad CP/M formatted 3.5" floppy and then read them on a PC using this software: http://8bit.yarek.pl/tool/pc.22disk/ Sadly working 3" drives are rather rare these days and tend to command 3-figure prices.
It's never so bad that it can't get worse.
About 5 years ago, I purchased an old Mac Plus somewhat on a whim, and somewhat to be able to get at my 1980s Mac disks. I had stuff that was about 20 years old at the time, going all the way back to 1984, including original copies of MacWrite 1.0, MacPaint 1.0, System 1.0, and Finder 1.0. (Unfortunately my Dad tossed the "Guided Tour" audio cassettes a while previously). Everything that I tried I was able to read just perfectly.
Contrast this to my experience at the time (it's been a while since I've used any floppies for anything) which included brand new, just out of the box, preformatted floppies being complete useless.
I think floppies were made to be reliable back when people used them for real data storage. And when people only used them for semi-disposable purposes, the quality control suffered.
Mind you, they used to cost $4.00 apiece for single sided 400 KB floppies, so I think we have made some positive strides in data storage in the past 25 years.
- Rich
It occurred to me that it is interesting that restoring data/games/programs from tape (a popular format before 5 1/4 and 3 inch discs became affordable for home computer use) would be easier due to the huge number of consumer (music) tape playback units manufactured and still available and that modern PCs typically have a sound card - some software could decode the WAV file into binary.
Since then music storage and computer storage have diverged. You can't normally use a standalone Music/Movie CD,DVD,HD-DVD, Bluray player to play discs congaing PC data/programs.
I transferred all my old apple ][ disks to my PC with all the useless crap I wrote in basic. I still have my ][c which helps. What I had to do was write a small program in apple monitor (assembly) to read the disk sectors one by one and echo the bytes in hex to the serial port. I wrote another program on my pc to listen on the serial port and read these hex codes back into bytes into a disk image file. I'd have to do a couple reads of each disk until I found an MD5 that was more prominent. It worked though!
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
You could try it as an emulator stacking contest. You could run an Amstrad emulator inside a qemu session under a VM in VMWare. What is the current record on emulator stacking?
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Don't forget that the TI-85 (1992) and TI-86 (1997) graphing calculators both used it. There was actually a fairly large resurgence in Z80 assembly programming when a hack was discovered on the TI-85 whereby assembly language programs could be stored in general memory and accessed from the "Custom" menu. ZShell, anybody?
Never been to Houston (or pretty much any other Southern city these days) have you?
Now a days, even the elementary schools in Houston teach the class in Spanish.
Feel sorry for the one English only speaking kid in the back of class starting around that is now lost, and will be from now on.
Very sad.
i sense a new slashdot meme
Best I ever did was:
Linux on the base hardware
Windows on VMWare
Winuae Amiga emulator on Windows
MAME arcade emulator on Amiga
Dig Dug on MAME
Sometimes my arms bend back.
VMWare will totally help you run a system that originally ran on a Z80
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
I just went and got a diskette hand-labeled "Windows for Workgroups 3.11, #1". Windows 95 replaced WFW, so the diskette is 14 years old. It is completely readable. Need evidence? Quote from SETUP.TXT:
/v /r /f. It found 512 bytes in a bad sector in one file, and said it fixed the problem. All other files were perfect.
"AT&T(R) Safari Computer
------
If you have an AT&T Safari computer, you cannot maintain two versions of Windows on your system. You must upgrade over your previous version of Windows, if you have one. If you set up Windows for Workgroups version 3.11 in its own directory, it will not use the special drivers required to run on the computer."
You said, "The plastic carrier has become brittle..." That kind of plastic is a hazard to the environment, because it doesn't break down.
"... the magnetic media has flaked off..." The substrate is Mylar. The glue is intensely adherent.
' "the bits on the media itself have "floated" ' Not so, I think I can install Windows for Workgroups again any time I like.
I ran chkdsk a:
That having been said, the CPC was probably one of the final "all-new" 8-bit formats to be released. The market was already pretty well established, with the ZX Spectrum and C64 already entrenched, so the CPC did reasonably considering. The first "next generation" 16-bits, the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga (which were popular in Europe) came out in 1985, although they were too expensive to displace the 8-bit formats until the price came down a few years later. The 8-bit market eventually went into terminal decline around the turn of the decade, although games were still being sold in mainstream shops until around 1991/92.
Anyway, Amstrad launched their first 16-bit PC clone around 1986 (arguably the first really affordable and successful PC clone in the UK), so although the CPC was still doing quite well, it wasn't Amstrad's "leading edge" at the time.
They also sold Z80-based word processors well into the 1990s, but those were never meant to compete with mainstream computers; they were sold to people who would otherwise have bought a typewriter.
OTOH, I don't know why they decided to launch an enhanced CPC in 1990- three years previously, it'd have been a good move, but it's not like anyone was going to be really interested in the machine, let alone support the new features when the 8-bit market was clearly on its last legs.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
ddrescue is an open source disk recovery tool based on dd. It can make a disk image from any kind of disk, regardless of format and it is designed to be very robust reading through bad blocks as you're likely to have on disks that old. You just need to have a floppy drive to connect to. ddrescue will compile and run on Linux, OS X and maybe Cygwin.
Once you have a disk image, Foremost can extract files from it. It is also open source and can be compiled and run on many different platforms and doesn't care about the filesystem on the disk image (or original disk). It searches for files based on header information. If need be, you can edit what header information it looks for. Since your BASIC source code is, presumably, ASCII text files, it shouldn't be a problem.
Elephant Memory Systems: http://dcymbal.metabarn.com/ems/index.html
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
No, but QEMU might, i hear there is a Z80 emulator for it somewhere.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You do not need a complete CPC to recover those disk... A working 3" CPC drive would be enough, any not-so-old PC controller can use it with the proper cable (a tweaked 5 1/4 PC drive ribbon cable) and software.
For example, look for CPCDiskXP here:
http://www.cpcmania.com
Buy an Amstrad with a working floppy drive. Read the disks and "squirt" the data via RS-232.
If that undergrad was a hard worker and successfully recovered the data, I bet he got a phat assignment the next summer.
I really expected to read at least one post starting "Typing at the moment this post on CPC...". There were no real geeks in CPC community, I guess. I mean, is it that hard to implement TCP stack and to port Firefox?
No sig today.
http://www.vintage-computer.com/
1. If you can afford it consider using a professional data recovery firm, that's what they do for a living.
2. The bit sizes on the old disks were huge (millions of ferrite particles) because of the primitive read write heads, there's a pretty good chance that there is enough of the bits left to recover.
Good Luck.
... For being excited by the prospect of learning everything you need to learn to actually BUILD one of these drives?
:)
Think about it, at some point someone somewhere had to make one of these from scratch before they went into mass production. As a one man job with 1980 technology it was achieveable and affordable.
How hard could it be in the modern day?
Every time I read an old history on Microsoft or Apples early days, I start itching to reproduce what they did when they first implemented these technologies.
It'd be like building your very own Wright Bros flyer
There seem to be several Amstrad emulators already. And if for some reason you don't like any of them, you could reuse an existing open source Z80 emulation core. Ours, for example. :)
SymbOS is a new graphical OS that provides binary compatibility across two Z80-based platforms: CPC and MSX. It can do multitasking and even play videos, on an 8-bit CPU.
Earlier this week I finished building a brand new batch of reflow furnace controllers that use dual Z80s. The design dates from the 80's and was been superseded by a controller that uses an AMD SC520, but some customers of the furnace manufacturer we sell the controllers to, want to keep using the same equipment they've had for 20 years with no changes, so my company still builds brand new electronics with 4MHz Zilog Z80 processors every few years.
Every time we think the product is finally dead, we get an order for more.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I've done this with my entire 100+ floppy collection of Atari 800 software. Bought a DIY cable off eBay (there's also instructions online on how to make your own) that connects Atari's weirdo proprietary SIO interface to a regular PC RS232 serial port with all the proper voltage conversions. Then just hook up my still-working monster truck of an Atari 810 disk drive straight to the PC...run a disk dump program I downloaded online in an XP command prompt...and save the images. Then fire up the excellent Atari800Win emulator (other equally excellent ones are available for Linux and Mac) and voila! For the most part all data--including my old 1982 tax returns and all kinds of AtariWriter docs and BASIC programs I wrote--was completely preserved. Some bad sectors on a few disks which the dump utility notified me of, but since read/writes were so simple and raw on that hardware you can have a bum sector periodically without hosing anything important except maybe causing a program to crash on some corrupted BASIC syntax. Found ROM's for all my old cartridges online, and now I have a burned CD that has my entire life and entire computing universe from 1982-88. Remarkable.
Unless the Amstrad drives have some funky-ass interface that just cannot be hooked up to a PC (and that's unlikely given how dirt simple 8-bit disk I/O interfaces used to be), there probably are similar patch cables and dump utilities available for transferring data from that platform. Vintage computing emulation is so hot right now as is format preservation that there are probably many people covering that platform. The only dilemma would be getting a working vintage disk drive since it's highly unlikely a stock PC 5 1/4" floppy drive could handle such alien formats without destroying the disk (even on a read). Fortunately an eBay search will probably show a lot of working vintage equipment if you don't have one. Refurbished Atari parts are in ample circulation...if my 810 drive wasn't so immortal I probably would've been able to get a replacement without too much trouble.
You had an Amstrad then, and a Mac now?
:p
Perhaps it's all for the best
Google: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=...
f*cking microsoft agents
And.. I'm okay with that....
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
If you can get hold of an External 3" Drive (DDI-1), and have Access to a Windows-PC, you could try this useful Program:
http://www.cpcmania.com/cpcdiskxp/cpcdiskxp.htm
You can Connect the Drive Directly to the PC, with the Standard PC-Floppy-Cable!
It has the Same Connector! Works Great so far.
Good Luck
I've been wanting to archive several shoeboxes of floppies - mainly FAT/FAT32, but several Apple II and other Unix - but I haven't had a great success rate with those I've tried and at least some of the time I suspect it is because of poor quality modern floppy drives. Yes, they generally work but I doubt anyone can make a robut floppy drive that retails for $20 or less (which I all do).
A long time ago I had seen someone talking about a 3.5" + 5.25" combo drive (USB?) which could read multiple formats including DOS and Amiga disks, but was never able to locate it. Poor Google-fu.
Ideas on that or someone who rents out a high quality drive would be appreciated since at $5 a disk it would cost me a new computer to read my data...
Thanks!
I was burning through tapes; all that rewinding to reset the counter, so I could find my programs. I was also failing 4th grade spelling. So the first program I ever wrote was a spelling program. You started it up, entered the spelling list and it would go through the list three times flashing the word up and then waiting for you to enter it. Repeating the word if you got it wrong. I aced a whole semester of spelling got the floppy drive and was the happest geek kid ever!
Wow - a CPC question on /. The best years of my life were spent hacking on a CPC - I worked as freelance technical editor for Amstrad Action magazine (on which the mighty Future Publishing was founded), coded a DTP system, a load of demos, a route-planner (you know, "I want to get from London to Edinburgh, what's the quickest way?"), and so on.
I used to get a handful of letters to AA's technical Qs+As column ("Techy Forum") every month asking "how do I transfer my files to a PC?". Lots of posters have mentioned the easiest ways to do it, which would probably be the ways I'd have recommended at the time: data transfer bureaux, hooking up a drive to a PC and copying across, etc. etc.
Here's a more involved solution, which is the best long-term one for the serious CPC hacker, and is how I do it. I'm not seriously recommending you do this.
Get a CPC with second drive interface (i.e. anything except an unexpanded 464), and connect a 3.5in drive - any standard Shugart 3.5in drive - to it. Theoretically you need a separate power supply for the 3.5in drive, but you can actually hotwire this to the monitor power supply.
Then use WriteDSK on the CPC to transfer CPC discs into .DSK images on a DOS-formatted 720k disc. (The CPC's FDC can't cope with 1.44Mb discs.) Getting WriteDSK onto your CPC in the first place is left as an exercise for the reader. :)
Put that in a USB floppy drive, copy across to your Mac and run in WinAPE under Parallels - far and away the best CPC emulator there is.
For general CPC information, have a look at CPCwiki. It's a goldmine in itself, but best of all is the scan archive of Amstrad Action, Amstrad Computer User etc. etc.
CPC BASIC source isn't ASCII unless you explicitly save it as such (SAVE "FILENAME.BAS",A). Usually it's tokenised.
Tsk, these kids with 2Gb memory... when I were a lad with a 64k Amstrad, every byte counted (contd. page 94)
Well, to recover the data from your amstrad disks, you'll either need to put a 3" disk drive on a PC or to have an Amstrad 664/6128 or a Spectrum+3
.DSK file from the 3"1/2 disk on your PC.
I'd recommend the latter solution as you'd probably have to rip an Amstrad/Spectrum to get that disk drive anyway...
Check that the drive is working OK. When I bought my Spectrum +3 on E-Bay, all was fine except for the disk drive...
The drive belt had to be replaced. You may find some brand new belt at "thesinclairshop" (also on E-Bay + has it's web site) or find some compatible belt. From various forums, it appears to be a very common problem.
To replace the belt, you won't need special tools, standard screwdrivers are all what you'll need... And lots of patience. Just be careful to not lose the Write-protect switch pin...
Then, you'll need to connect a 3"1/2 drive to the amstrad/spectrum. Here, you'll have a second problem. One of the pins used to have a READY signal and now have a DISC PRESENT signal (or the opposite ?). Some floppy drives will be unusable, other will need to change a jumper... The fun part is that now, these jumpers are SMD jumpers SOLDERED to the floppy control board...
You'll have to make your own floppy cable too ad you'll need to force the level of the "density select" pin (Amstrad only knows Double Density and not High Density), the side select pin (some use a switch to be able to use both sides of the floppy) and to be sure that you've the right wiring order.
From now, you'll be able to format the 3"1/2 disks in Amstrad format, copy the 3" disk to the 3"1/2 and use some tools to extract the
You may also use tools that allows to write to FAT floppies on the amstrad... your choice... Lots of other messages here already told about these tools so I won't repeat them.
You can run a mac emulator on the amiga, and Mame on the Mac, for an extra step
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
Mod parent down. This is an issue about getting disks into a correct drive and other issues which would come up long before it could be a nice unix-style block device. DD wouldn't help here.
I'm no expert in Amstrad machines, but if you can find one of them in working order, I guess you could just use a serial cable and two small communications programs, written in Basic. I did that 20 years ago, in order to recover the data from an ancient 'typesetting' machine to a PC. Good luck
Try hunting out Locomotive Software in the UK, who helped me retrieve some data from Amstrad floppies some years back. I think they produced a lot of the original software for Amstrad. JJ
Bloody hell, it's Richard Fairhurst! Where did I put those back-issues of Amstrad Action...
"You heard the man, Tubbs.. get undressed."
Nostalgia is what it used to be!
The original Amstrad wordprocessor came out at an interesting time in the UK. Unemployment rates were sky high and one of my friend's dads (he had two) quit the day-job to build a new writing career. The Amstrad was bought with a grant, then available to people wanting to set up their own business (therefore reducing the unemployment figures). I think there was five pounds a week more than 'dole' in doing this and you did not have to 'sign on' every fortnight.
Anyway, on a chance visit to friend's dad five years ago I noticed this particular Amstrad was still in use, in it's original application. There was green rationale in not throwing the thing out (and getting a PC), furthermore, for word-processing, what more do you need? The Z80 was able to keep up with the typing and even the largest poetry anthologies could fit on those disks.
Given the decades of use I doubt that this particular Amstrad has yet to be chucked out. I would be surprised if it has been moved out of the study, it probably isn't collecting dust either as the dust covers (remember them?) always went on when the machine was turned off.
Message me if you live in the UK and want to track down a 'current user'.
From my experience, hooking a 3"1/2 drive to the CPC itself is the best way to proceed.
The precious information might not be there at all.
If you didn't migrate it to a more recent format, you might be Sadly Out of Luck
This only highlights the problem durability of information in a digital age, especially if the power goes down due to another technological dark age. (insert scenario here)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Even if you had 3.5" floppies, there were hundreds of formats, your best chances with anything are with finding the original machine capable of reading the disks.
;)
A few years ago, I had about 500 3.5" floppy disks, that were not only from an HP 9845 computer from 1976, were created using a 3rd party 'storage rom' on a disk/harddrive combo unit not originally designed for the HP 9845. (Looked like it came from the HP Apollo series unix machines.)
I went so far as to track down the original author of the storage rom. He couldn't tell me much except that there were hundreds of different 3.5" formats from the era. He wished me luck, and mailed me an original manual for his rom that he had kicking around.
In then end, I got an old HP 9845 machine, made it use the printer for the console, since the display was fried... bought this product called HT Basic for windows with an IEEE-488 card, and I wrote basic programs on either end, to send the data over to the PC.
Good luck buddy, you're going to need it.
-lo
I still have my 2 Commodore PET's and associated cassette and disk drives along with all my code from back then. Every couple years I fire one up and load a program or two for fun. Last time was about a year ago and all worked like a charm.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
There used to be a technology that used a staining solution of some kind and could view the data on 1/2 tapes as differently shaded bands. I recall hearing stories about this, and at 800 or even 1600 bpi I am sure it was feasible to recover data that way if the motivation arose.
Not sure why you would want to, if the tape drive actually existed, perhaps in the case of a tape that was burned or crumpled.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
The floppy drives for the Commodore 64 & 128 were basically outdated technology even in their heyday. However, each drive contained a 6910 (or 6902?) processor, just like the computer itself. Furthermore, almost everything involved in reading and writing was programmable: Track stepping, sectors-per-track, bytes-per-sector, and even the GCR (Group Code Recording) lookup table. All of the details were extensively well-documented (mostly by enthusiasts, rather than Commodor). I think the communications between drive and computer was serial (although using some sort of DIN connector), so it ought to be possible to cobble together an interface.
I never got hold of the last, most-evolved batch of drives for the c128, but I vaguely recall that they were actually capable of supporting double-sided floppies. There were both 5.25" and 3.5" drives. I'm wondering if it wouldn't be worth hunting down a set of drives (and possibly a c128) in order to read and recover various obsolete media (for example, I have old CP/M & ISIS-II 5.25" floppies, old 8-Sector IBM single-sided 5.25" floppies, DEC Rainbow 5.25" floppies, Commodore-64 single-sided/single-density 5.25" floppies, and Atari 520-ST 720K 3.5" floppies), as well as stacks of PC-style double-sided/high-density 5.25" floppies (and no computer with a 5.25" drive).
Making a hybrid PC/Commodore "Media-Conversion" box out of one of my old PC "husks" might actually be an interesting and worthwhile project...
google to see if someone is doing some kind of amstrad archive project where they'r trying to collect all software etc for amstrad etc. these people are likely to have the hardware necessary for reading your disks, and may be willing to help you, especially if you have some rare amstrad stuff
and fire up my old fido node for old time sake :)