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?
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
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
It's easy to find old Amstrad HW in Europe anyway.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
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.
This actually isn't as insane or absurd as you wanted it to seem. There are actually products like MagnaView that have very tiny magnetic particles suspended in a solvent, and will clearly image the magnetic information on a mag tape, credit card magnetic stripe or even a floppy disk. And considering that someone has already written a program to play analog audio off of a scan of a vinyl record, extracting the data from a floppy "developed" with MagnaView shouldn't be that hard. Still,I would suggest tracking down an original Amstrad and just reading the disks. They were not extremely common in the US and might be harder to find here, but were pretty common in Europe. I don't know where the original poster is. Once you can read the data, the next trick would be to get it to an emulator. No problem if the Amstrad has the serial port option, if it does not there are still plenty of ways to get the data to another system, with options including flashing the screen and picking up the data with a webcam, encoding it as audio and capturing it with a soundcard, and even printing it out in a dense binary form and then scanning it back in again.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
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
I used to work at a recovery company. We "baked" sticky media in an "oven" (the kind you see in biolabs) before attempting recovery.
I've had great luck with the 3M disks.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
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...]
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.