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.

  • reddig33@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    They make SD card adapters for the C64 — much easier if you cant get the floppy drive to work. You might search for topics like “1541 drive alignment” and “1541 head clean” on YouTube (or 1581 if it’s that drive model).

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
    0·
    2 days ago

    Load the directory first to see if there is a program to run. Load"$",8

    Then list it

    I think if the first program you wantes to load wasI binary you needed load"*",8,1

    • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      LOAD”$”,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?

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
        0·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
          0·
          1 day ago

          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…

          • BCsven@lemmy.ca
            0·
            1 day ago

            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

              • BCsven@lemmy.ca
                0·
                16 hours ago

                That brings back memories. Dino Eggs, and Satan’s Hollow got the most screen time, even though things like Impossible Mission and Beachhead |I were more actoin and actual speech for sounds.

            • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
              0·
              17 hours ago

              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!

              • BCsven@lemmy.ca
                0·
                16 hours 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.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
    0·
    2 days ago

    Floppy discs and their drives are notoriously fragile.

    I’d start with making sure that the drive head is clean and not rusted. Test on a new floppy disc.

    I’d be very surprised if the standard LOAD command would still work, and I’d start with making a block copy of the disc(s).

    You can access individual disc blocks from within BASIC, I wrote a disc editor at the time to do just that.

  • Artwork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Freaking awesome! Such a lovely, magnificent historical miracle…

    Still partially works! Or it does indeed work, but just the machine does not process the data correctly, including modern memory, logic, architecture instructions order etc.