jmtd → log → Amiga floppy recovery project

I've still got it!

Recovered floppy disks

This is the first part in a series of blog posts. The next part is Amiga floppy recovery project, part 2. The whole series is available here: Amiga.

My first computer was an Amiga A500, and my brother and I spent a fair chunk of our childhoods creating things with it. These things are locked away on 3.5" floppy disks, but they were also lost a long time ago.

A few weeks ago my dad found them in a box in his loft, so a disk-reading project is now on the horizon! Step one is to catalogue what we've got, which I've done here. Step two is to check which, if any, of these are not already in circulation amongst archivists. Thanks to Matthew Garrett for pointing me at the Software Preservation Society, which is a good first place to check.

When we get to the reading step, there are quite a few approaches I could take. Which one to use depends to some extent on which disks we need to read, and whether they employ any custom sector layout or other copy protection schemes. I think the easiest method using equipment I already have is probably Amiga Explorer and a null-modem cable, as this approach will work on an A500 with Workbench 1.3.

There are a variety of hardware tools and projects for reading Amiga floppies on a PC, but the most interesting one to me is DiscFerret, which is open hardware and software.