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Build a Cheap Media-Reading PC?
tsm_sf writes "A recent Slashdot article got me thinking about dead and dying media. I'd like to build a cheap PC with the goal of being able to read as many old formats as possible. Size and power consumption would be design considerations; priority of media formats would be primary. How would you approach such a project?"
what is wrong with your existing pc? what with between open office and mpd on Ubuntu ... I can read most formats!!
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
Or, several of them.
Archive format of the future:
http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/
Deleted
What's wrong with getting a commodity PC, a couple of USB hubs and as many adapters as you can lay your hands on? Most every connection I can think of has a USB adapter for it..
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Get yourself a big tower case and one of each of these: 5.25" floppydrive, Zip-drive, Travan tape-reader, Creative tape-drive, DAT tapedrive, single speed cd-rom (for these *really* pesky cd's), dvd+/-RW. And a 77-in-1 flashmemory readers.
Then, make sure you have a parallel port, a serial port and a game port (there is actually backup media that connects to the game port, what where they thinking).
After the hardware, start with software: DOS, Win'98se, Win2000, WinXP at least. Then Linux (drivers for almost any filing system) and, i kid you not, FreeBSD (very good drivers for obscure hardware, especially backup hardware).
That's a start, at least.
I guess that you probably don't want to build around a Macintosh heart since it's probably easiest to get interesting older devices for the PC architecture. However, there's a whole set of interesting media related to the apple 3.5" floppies which used variable angular density of bits to achieve more even linear density (in other words, more bits on the outer tracks, less on the inner tracks). This needs special hardware and I think only some PC drives could possibly support reading this. This is, of course, a bit sick but not as bad as Apple II gaming media where you actually have to be able to load bits of the device driver from the disk as you go along. In a primitive form of Digital Restrictions Management, they used to stop the drive motor and continue to reaad as they went along.
Later apple media 3.5" Floppy was mostly 1.44Mb standard.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Sounds like a winner to me!
A backup of my PC will only be about five million pages or so.
If the disk ever goes down then rescanning the pages will be a doddle.
No sig today...
You probably want a motherboard wit as many PCI slots as possible. Depending on your needs, you might even need to find a motherboard that has one of those rogue ISA slots. I'd browse around ebay and geeks.com to look for such gnarly old hardware. If you could find a motherboard that had
A quick google found this:
Gigabyte Ga-6Vtxea
Gigabyte Ga-6Vtxea ; Via 694T , On-Board Ac97 Audio , Ata100 ; 3X 168Pin Dimm, 5X Pci, 1X Isa, 1X Agp, 1 X Amr
That would be right up your alley. It probably has serial ports as well. Wow, it's pretty: image
They don't make them like that anymore.
From there, get one PCI card with USB support, get a/multiple usb hubs... grab some parallel and/or serial to usb adaptors.
Don't forget to track down a scsi card for one of the pci slots, among other random interface cards.
Usually to read old media, you wouldn't start by building a PC. The first thing is the hardware that works with the media, for example a reel to reel tape drive, 8, 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 inch floppy drive, tape drive for old cartridge tape formats etc. Then you look at the interface needed to work that old hardware, then you look at what computer you need to host that interface, then an operating system, then the tools needed to get to and make sense of the data.
Luckily the OS part is pretty easy. Linux has support for all sorts of weird and wonderful interfaces right out of the box. It's also usually packaged with all manner of powerful tools good for getting data off old media.
It's getting old hardware to actually work that'll challenge you.
Expect all old media to contain lots of errors, and expect media readers to die. I would focus on migrating from old media to hard-disk based storage since old floppys, tapes and CDs have a limited lifespan. I would also have multiple readers for the same format since a CD that doesn't work in one reader might work in another.
I personally would go for a bigtower with multiple 5.25" and 3.5" floppy readers, CD-rom reader, a memory card reader, dvd/blueray and HD-DVD reader and 2 x 1 TB Harddrives in mirror raid to ensure that no migrated data is lost.
Some media might be unreadable my modern OS:s. Equip the machine with enough memory to run virtual machines which are given direct access to the media readers. If you need DOS to read a diskette, boot the DOS vm.
8-inch reel to reel, 8 inch floppies, cassettes...You're gonna need some large reels to read some of the formats that I have around. I haven't played the Space Invaders game from my TRS-80 cassettes in 20 years.
Something with basic I/O sampling so you can read all those old Audio Cassettes... Amstrad, C64, Sinclair, MSX, Oric, Ti99-4A, JR-100, Vic-20, BBC etc.
I sometimes wonder what I would make of the old things I used to write and do on those old systems...
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
a time machine
This takes some work to set up, but will give you a lot of control over your power consumption.
As has been mentioned before, a lot of older readers are IDE devices, and so, can easily be converted to USB. (Note that for IDE, the device must be plugged in and powered when the system boots, otherwise it won't be recognized.)
After converting to USB, splice in relays - on the device power cable and the USB +5V cable (to prevent the device from half-powering-up via USB power). Connect the relay control to the appropriate voltage via a pushbutton switch which you can mount on the front of your computer (can sacrifice a drive bay for a panel of switches).
This will let you turn each device on and off as you want.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Catweasel disk controller yet. http://www.jschoenfeld.com/products/catweasel_e.htm Its a hard to find board since its done in limited production runs.
Why? Why do you think you need such a thing? What are you going to use it for?
There's a plethora of different media out there. Anything from Punch-cards to Single-reel tape to QIC, HDD with different interfaces, hell, even Magneto Opical/UDO and Microfilm or, God forbit, Floppy or even normal Casette Tapes (Remember MSX "DatRecorders"?)
Then there's a plethora of software used to write to these media. Any tape drive usually was written to with Networker, DataProtector/Omniback II, AMANDA, NetBackup or BackupExec, not to mention older iterations such as ArcServe and whatnot. The Harddisks can be formatted with the most wild versions of FAT, FAT16, 32, NTFS in various flavours, Ext*, Reiser and so on, while Casette tapes were written by a BASIC OS.
Then there's a plethora of software used to create the objects on those media. You have your CoDecs for rich media, your office formats of yore like WordPerfect 5.1... The list is nigh endless. When you say you want a media reading PC, you need to delimit your project somewhat, because you could end up with half a data center filled with machines for various purposes.
So, again:
- Why do you need it?
- What for?
Besides, if you still have floppies with your original copy of The Secret of Monkey Island on it, do you really need to be able to read those, or do you simply surf into a retro-gaming site to find the images and a suitable run-time environment for them?
Sounds like someone, probably their "friend", wants to view their old pr0n.
If you want to start at the bottom...
figure out how to read the oldest disk first...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc
A good start is to get a Catweasel floppy controller. If you connect a 3", a 3.5", a 5.25" and a 8" floppy drive to it you will be able to read almost any floppy disk there is, including C64, Amiga, CP/M, CPC, Mac, Apple II, Famicom and so on.
Then comes the bigger problem: Finding the tools to extract files from their filesystems. There are small extraction/conversion tools on the net for almost every format there is, collecting dust on long forgotten areas of FTP servers. Some of them require some slight modifications to compile on post-80s UNIX and some only run in MSDOS with full hardware access, but with some patience, DOSBox, Google and imgtool from MESS you should be able to work with most of them.
Then finally comes the biggest problem: Finding applications that can work with the actual files...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
...is why do Ask Slashdot articles keep getting posted in other sections?
Make sure to provide support for this!
This will be a lot harder than you think. It's not just the problem of keeping that machine running, having software that can use all those arcane formats, fitting it all into a box etc. The problem is that the hardware WILL die, whether it's the computer (which might have to have ISA slots etc. for some peripherals and so will be tricky to replace) or the media readers.
The method I use for data (and bear in mind that I haven't really bought anything new for a PC in years, so we're talking cheapskate methods) is to get a large hard drive every now and again (Christmas presents, recovered from broken PC's, old ones from work, etc.), and convert the media up to "hard drive" format. Being an emulation fan really helps here... disk images are the way to go. The first time you do it, it's an immense pain because you're swapping media, etc. But then, say your hard drive gets out of date (e.g. IDE vs SATA). You buy a SATA drive and automatically copy across all that old data including your virtual CD ROM images. Then when SATA is out of date, you do the same again.
Because of the increases in capacity each time, you'll barely notice that you're carrying around 10-15 year old data. I do this properly about every 2 or 3 years (and gradually over time as well), I end up getting a bigger hard drive from somewhere and "upgrading" again. My current PC has six hard drives (two of which are very old ones which I've already copied onto larger ones within the same machine and so can just disconnect them) and about four CD/DVD players (the first was a CD drive, the next was a CD-RW, then a DVD, then a DVD-RW, etc. each one superceding the last). I still have my very first hard drive laying about (it was a 40Mb Connor) and I still have the data that was on that drive on my newest drives.
Each one of those hard drives in my PC has the complete contents of at least two previous hard drives on it. And I still have the original hard drives (powered off in the base unit, or kept safely somewhere) for extra backup should I need it. It means that I don't lose my files, I never have to "recreate" something I've already done (scripts, programs, documents, etc.) and that I can do a quick search and know that I'm searching in every bit of data I've ever owned. When you KNOW that you saved something but can't remember the filename, when or where, that's a great assurance to have. I also have disk/tape images on every Spectrum game I ever owned, if you want to get silly. It's ridiculous how little space my entire Spectrum software library that took years to build up actually takes on a modern hard drive.
For peripherals, what I tend to do is wait for a format to establish itself (e.g. USB) and then slowly get all the adaptors I need to run all my old hardware on that format. So I have USB->just-about-everything adaptors. My main PC runs an AT keyboard with a PS/2 adaptor on a USB->PS/2 convertor. Then, when Wireless USB or some other successor comes along, all I need to do is buy a single USB->Wireless USB adaptor and I'm instantly back in business. No new keyboard required, and I have every adaptor necessary to run ANY type of keyboard should I need to. It means that my favourite hardware can last a lifetime (barring failure of the device itself).
It also makes things incredibly useful when you need to fix/repair/gut older PC's. If someone is still using an old AT PC, I'll have at least one cable/adaptor that will let me pull the data off it somehow, and a few more adaptors to get it working enough with modern hardware (USB, SATA, HDMI, etc.) so that I can get to the point to diagnose the computer if it's broken. If that means a daisy-chain of adaptors because the format is so legacy, so be it. At one point my mouse was a serial one, with a PS/2 adaptor, plugged into USB. I only upgraded because I wanted a scroll wheel. It can happen with everything. For example, I know for a fact that I have enough adaptors to convert a modern PSU (even ones with only SATA connectors but watch out f
I do some of this stuff for a living, and even though I can cover only a fraction of the media formats out there I have rack upon rack of obsolete peripheral devices. Most of the more recent ones are SCSI, some differential, some single-ended. A good few of the older ones (especially the old 12" 1GB glass optical disk drives) are bus and tag (I have SCSI converters for those...)
As for actually *reading* the data, I have about 19 feet of dog-eared, yellowing documentation and a C compiler.
You *sure* you want to get involved in this?
What about punch cards?
Scanners could be used for that...
What the op, tsm_sf, is looking for here, is a magic wand. He wants to build a cheap small machine he can stick anywhere and with it be a wizard at reading obsolete physical formats. But that's just plain absurd. The reason the old formats died off was simply because they WEREN'T small and cheap (and they ran out of bits).
So I offer two solutions to the OP. One is a usb floppy drive, which is everything his overly vague request requested. The second is a magic wand from Flourish & Bott's, 'cause that's the only thing that could possibly fulfill his request for anything older than floppy drives.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
A backup of my PC will only be about five million pages or so.
2 things...
1: Once you take out your operating system, applications, porn and downloaded music collection... How much real data do you actually have? I'd bet it'd fit on a handful of pages, particularly if you convert it to a standardised data format which might still be readable in 10,20 years.
2: An archive is not a backup. And a backup makes a poor archive. An archive is a copy of something you may want to read or access in 10 years, 100 years, 500 years. A backup is something you do to preserve your current working data set in case of failure.
HTH
Having said that. Even though paper has a proven n hundred year archival track record, I doubt it is a practical solution for digital data.
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Wang-tek? No, i really don't want to know what sort of interface cards they make!
Get a CatWeasel MK IV so you can read any floppy disk format.
http://www.nishtek.com/cw.html
http://www.softhut.com/cgi-bin/test/Web_store/web_store.cgi?page=catalog/hardware/accelerators/catweaselmkiv.html&cart_id=6841513_65721
He doesn't. If he was serious, he'd already know exactly what kinds of disc/tape/card/wax cylinders he wanted to read and Googled how to do it. The only reason the question was submitted was to make a provocative "Ask Slashdot" topic. Same as 90% of these, hardly a word in their backstory is true, and all the brain sweat and long detailed posts written to attempt to help the poster are wasted.