Blog post: How the data recovery process is going, some studio organization, and some new (to me) video games.
Category: Retro Computers
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):...
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...
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...
Flopping and Thrusting
I'm going to try to do a weekly round-up. Try to establish consistency and all that... Retro Computing As part of trying to do my small part in preserving Atari ST history, I figured that it doesn't take too much time or energy to find batches of floppies out there in the world and see if there is interesting source code or software that needs to be preserved. I recently won an online auction for very cheap that had 200+ disks. The shipment arrived this week. It looks like the majority of the disks are ST-related, with some being Windows/PC-related. I hooked up my external floppy drive/Greaseweazle enclosure and imaged the disks to my hard drive. I still need to go through each disk to see their actual contents, and from there, will determine if there's anything that needs to be archived online. The Adventures of Johnny Thrust I've begun...
Comics Overload and a Splash of Retro
I finally got my main Atari 1040STE ("Jules") set up with STiNG 1.26 (TCPIP stack) and CAB 2.8e (Crystal Atari Browser). Browsing the web on a computer that was created 10 years before the web was is a pretty rough experience. I expect the real endgame will be to realy get a decent two-way transfer system set up like FTP (SMB is not an option without considering MultiTOS or something like that). I've been slowly assembling a nice collection of popular and useful utilities, applications, and even a few games. The main focus, however, will be to use Jules to archive the large stack of in-box games I got last year. I also ended up jailbreaking my Sony PS Vita 1000 handheld console and have been enjoying playing some games on it here and there. Moving away from retro computers and on to retro comics (back issues), I've been on...
