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[C64] Trying to LOAD and RUN floppy disks from 1990-1995. (piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/techsupport@lemmy.world
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I have disassembled and dedusted the disk drive and still get this error on an Commodore 64. Is it probable that the floppy diskettes are simply demagnetized by now? I am trying to recover some of dad's old essays and poems.

Edit: the error channel says READ ERROR

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Edit2: the read head is not rusted. In fact, it looks like new. ๐Ÿ˜… Tried both LOAD"*",8 and LOAD"$",8 on another ten or so disks, with the same file not found error.

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[โ€“] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (7 children)

LOADโ€$โ€,8 gives the same error. I'm pretty sure dad was writing essays and poems, not programs. Is plain text saved in binary format anyway? Or is there another way to list/display text?

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    If it won't load the directory, then the diskette is either corrupted or was never formatted. Text files would have just been a text type file rather than binary, unless he used a special word processor and these are savw file disks in a different format.

    If you happen to have a copy of KwikCopy (I think) you can read bytes on the disk by sector. If there is actual ASCII text you will see it show in the hex editor panel.

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  • [โ€“] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (5 children)

    Thanks! Does this mean, that if there were any chars / ASCII representable data on the floppies, they would've been displayed by a LOAD"*",8? Some of his floppies clearly say on the labels "letters" or "poems" and such...

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    LOAD"*",8 just loads the first PRG file it finds on the disk, its like a shirt cut to using LOAD"$",8 and the LIST, then typing LOAD"nameoffile",8.

    If LOAD"$",8 doesn't find anything it means the directory doesn't have a file listing, so could be damaged or empty.

    But, if he was using a word processor (from another disk) then the poetry disk could be a save disk of the word processor and could be in a proprietary format, like one giant database or something that won't show as a regular directory list.

    Or there is a slim chance he encrypted the work. I used to have a sentry program you ran first, and gave password before you could read scrambled content. I doubt it was that because we didn't really worry about encryption that much back then, it was more of a fun thing to try

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  • [โ€“] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Thanks for all the help! He says he definitely didn't use encryption, but he'll have to ask around among his peers whether they used some an editor or not. I'm starting to give on them though, having tried variant of LOAD and re-initializing the drive between the errors... The cassette tapes work though, amazingly! All these game. I just LOVE the soundtrack!

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 2 months ago

    Yep, tape is still used as major archiving today, it has the best longevity for large amount of data.

    The diskettes are possibly toast then, unless you can read the blocks on the disk individually to get info off of them.

    The C64 sound chip is pretty amazing it was half a digital chip and half analog. People still buy the old scavanged sound chips for use in modern electronic sound emulators.

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