PC Historian Finds Puzzling Game Diskette Image

This past weekend, Trixter — a self-proclaimed IBM PC historian — picked up some old software for his archive. What he didn't count on was a couple of additional Avantage titles that had never been released into the wild. If this weren't enough of a find, one of these titles provided Trixter with an interesting puzzle: the diskette for Mental Blocks is apparently hand-formatted to work on both C64 and IBM (on a single side, not the "flippy disks" of old). Quite an interesting little piece of history.

Comments

In my day, we had to hand format disks

[Anonymous Coward]

With a tiny magnet, flipping 1's and 0's.

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[porkchop_d_clown]

You had magnets!?!

We had rub our fingers against piece of sheepskin really fast to build up a static charge and then touch the bits to flip them!

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[Anonymous Coward]

you had ones AND zeros? We only had zeroes. We were too poor to afford all those ones. We had to just close our eyes and imagine the ones. When we finally got a few ones, we had to use them sparingly and reuse them, we only had 8 ones between all us kids, and when we wanted to format our disks, we had to format then one byte at a time, then recycle those ones. SUre, you might occasionally get lucky and get to do a few bytes at the same time, but those solid blocks of 255s used to kill us. Spoiled rotten damn rich kid,

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[morgan_greywolf]

Disks? Huh. You kids and your newfangled "disks". Why, in my day, we had paper tape. Except we were too poor to have a tape puncher, so we had to use a pencil! And we were too poor to own a pencil sharpener, so when the pencil broke, we had to use our teeth!

Now get off of my lawn!

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[The Great Mooch]

You kids and your new fangled paper tape. In my day we had to chew the wood into a pulp to make the paper to make the cards we had to use.

Now get off my lawn.

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[richie2000]

You have a lawn? Spoiled brat!

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[JeanBaptiste]

You had fingers!?!

I'm not even going to tell you how we charged our sheepskins.

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[DigitAl56K]

You had wood? .. wait, on second thoughts I don't like where this is going ..

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[Hurricane78]

Let me guess... Hillbilly style, from behind? :D

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's the reason there are so few famous female programmers.

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[Kratisto]

You have Italics? In *my* day, the only way to show emphasis on the internet was to put asterisks on either side of the word. Do you youngins have any idea how much sarcasm went unnoticed back in the day?

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[richie2000]

we used to dream of asterisks not to mention all punctuation those were not even invented back in the day

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[digitig]

Paper tape? Eee, tha' were lucky. In my day we had to toggle the loader in on front panel switches.

The disturbing thing is that it's true, I *am* that old.

Re:In my day, we had to hand format disks

[Anonymous Coward]

...could spot a bad sector by looking at it ... copy all the data from the old sector on to a piece of paper, go to the new sector, type it all back in ... notebooks filled with pages and pages of hex numbers...

You're like some kind of super nerd. Like you were built in a laboratory out of parts from lesser nerds.

Just more corruption on the 8088 ...

[DigitalDreg]

It's just another case of corruption on an 8088 ;-)

(If you know Trixter, then you know what I'm talking about ... http://www.oldskool.org/pc/8088_Corruption )

OB: XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

Pussy. I use butterflies.

http://xkcd.com/378/

Re:OB: XKCD

[zippthorne]

Pfft. Real programmers just think really hard, choosing the proper universe such that electrons happen to tunnel at just the right place and time to affect the magnetizer.

Even better ones choose the universe in which the atoms of the proper hard disk spontaneously tunnel into just the right configuration from across spacetime.

I thought something different...

[iCeSkUuBe]

I clicked on the story thinking he had found some kind of strange Goatse image embedded in the disk. I was very disappointed.

Re:I thought something different...

[HTH NE1]

I clicked on the story thinking he had found some kind of strange Goatse image embedded in the disk. I was very disappointed.

Thank you for that. I'll never be able to look at the spindle hole of an 8" or 5.25" disk the same way again.

Re:There were a few hybrid formats around in the 8

[Yvan256]

Not only that, but on a 3.5" floppy too!

Re:There were a few hybrid formats around in the 8

[FromellaSlob]

LOL, ok that KB, not MB.

Re:Not really that hard...

[Anonymous Coward]

>It's been now about 25 years but I still have parts of the C64 ROM's memorized.
>There was a time that I knew pretty much what every byte in the 64k(*) of memory was for cold without needing a reference manual.

I have SYS 64738 that part of my memory a long time ago.

Re:Tiltowait

[argent]

That was the first game that I pirated... after I bought it.

The copy protection was so messed up that the only way I could get a copy of the game that was reliable was a cracked copy. But I didn't want a pirated diskette, so I had the cracked copy written over the original gold-labelled floppy.

Re:Hybrid disks - not a novel idea after all!

[billcopc]

So that person's claim to fame was using ISOBuster to save an "optimized" ISO ?

Wow.

No really, I'm impressed. I mean, it took some serious cojones to actually click that checkbox.