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
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?"
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.
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/
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.
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!
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!
Three FOOT floppy? Hate to to see it when it's not floppy.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
http://www.pcwking1.netfirms.com/disc-conversions.html
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!
Just the drive (got an old AT style PC) here: Ebay!
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; }
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.
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
Try emailing the people who write those emulators you mention.
No sig today...
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.
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.
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
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...]
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Actually, none of the Amstrad CPC464, CPC664 and CPC6128 had serial ports anyway. A serial interface was an optional extra that plugged into the back.
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.
"You heard the man, Tubbs.. get undressed."