Blog post: How the data recovery process is going, some studio organization, and some new (to me) video games.
Author: Chewbode
Hot dogs!
Trippin’ and Assemblin’
I didn't post a blog entry last week due to the family flying to Cancun for our older-daughter's 30th birthday. As such, there's not too much to report, as the majority of this past week has been all about the trip. Retro Computing No further progress on the floppy disk archival yet, as I've been focused on assembling the disk polisher I mentioned in the previous post. Everything finished printing and all of the electronics and hardware arrived, so I was able to fully assemble the device, but haven't actually done any disc testing yet. I need to burn a couple of sample CDs, scratch them up, and then test in the polisher before I move on to real discs. Carl has also informed me that there's another box inbound with Zip disks. I'll be getting the 5.25" floppy and Zip drives out this weeks, servicing and testing them, and...
Old Disks, Discs
It's been a busy summer. I last posted about two months ago, which is a little disappointing as I was on such a good roll. So, I figured I'd drop this update real quick. Retro Computing Carl sent me a bunch of very old 3.5" floppy disks along with some old CDs and DVDs with the hope that I could recover the data off them. So far, I've gone through all of the floppies and have built a database and web-based front-end to create a proper catalog of everything including: High-resolution scanned image of disks Searchable version of the text appearing on the labels Name of the archived disk flux images (IMG/BIN/ST) List of disk contents showing filenames and file sizes Meta data indicating DS or HD disk type, and if it's Atari or IBM formatted Also, if the disk contains any Cubase songs (ALL files) or arrangements (ARR files):...
A Little Footy
Not much to report this week other than we've decided to replace the air conditioner at the house, which will take place this coming Wednesday. Fun. Even though I'm not a huge football/soccer fan, I've been watching the last couple of World Cup games. I really enjoyed the France vs. England match yesterday (England won and obtained Bronze), but the big one is today in just a couple of hours (Spain vs. Argentina). Will be cooking come burgers and dogs and plopping down on the couch the rest of the day. Studio Infrastructure I’ve been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work over the last couple of months. Some has been boring, business-related tasks, and other things have been more fun and creative. All of this has required re-organizing the physical studio as well as the logical layout of files and digital assets. There’s been hardware and software purchases, proof-of-concept testing,...
Back Home and Gettin’ Busy
A Nueva York Cari and I spent the 4th of July weekend in New York at her sister’s house. My mother-in-law has been staying with us since early March (she came down for Dominic and Elvira’s wedding), and it was finally time for her Florida vacation to come to an end. She won’t fly, doesn’t drive, and is getting up there in years, so a solo train ride isn’t happening either. So, driving is the only real option. Here’s a run-down of the trip: Wednesday, July 1: Dominic and Elvira picked me up around 5:00pm and dropped me off at the rental car company, which has a branch in the Brandon mall. I got a black Mazda CX50, which is a crossover SUV. For a road trip with three people and a bunch of luggage, it’s decent. After driving it back to the house, we all packed and prepared to...
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! Sticker
Delve into the mystery of this month's VGM pack-in bonus.
Some Semblance of Order
Studio Organization After printing, assembling, and mounting the left-hand unit, the side-cabinet project is now complete. I found that the methodology for attaching the mounting buttons to the side of the organizer was very cumbersome, even after making some adjustments to the cabinet design before printing this second unit. I need to spend more time refining this before releasing the designs to the public, as it’s a big point of frustration. All-in-all, I’m very happy with the results and the clean look vs. old, ugly, open shelves is a big improvement. Retro Computing As mentioned in a previous post, I obtained and backed up about 200 floppy disks for the ST. I finally spent time going through all the disks, of which there were about 120 that weren’t bad. The data has been dropped on the hard drive of my STE and is roughly cataloged. The only thing left to...
Side Cabinet, Side Trip
Not much of an update his week as I had a bunch of dental work done Monday morning and I was down for the count until Thursday. I'm back to normal now, though. Akro-Mils Side Cabinet Success! After a pretty extensive workout, my Bambu Lab P1P finished printing all of the pieces for my first cabinet. I was able to design all of the parts so they didn't require supports, which kept the print time down. The cabinet sections took the longest; about 36 hours of printing. Designing them to not need supports really helped that time be as low as possible. Printed parts weren't the only things needed. I had some hardware left over from a previous project and I purposefully designed the cabinets to use them. Here's what it takes: (Qty. 4) 3D printed cabinet sections (Qty. 4) 3D printed cabinet doors (Qty. 2) 3D printed shelves (Qty....
Archiving and Organizing
The Annals I've officially added an archive feature to the site. It's VERY early and there's only a single, silly item in there, but if you want to check it out, visit the Annals. As new things get added, they'll be mentioned in the Miscellany section of this blog. Video Games Another Atari ST boxed game arrived this week: Droid: The Definitive Collection published by Bitmap Soft. Although the original Droid and it's follow-up, Droid II, were released back in the '90s, there's recently been an enhanced version created of the first game by Jamie Hamshere that adds support for the Atari STE hardware as well as provides quality-of-life improvements to the gameplay. All of these are bundled into this boxed release. All of the materials for the box have been scanned, so I just need some time to get it into online archives. Studio Organization A while back I...
One Million Pac-Man Dollars
To start off, I wanted to keep it simple by adding something very easy: One Million Pac-Man Dollars novelty money.
