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2023-06-18
I've spent some time these last few months to accumulate flux-images
of floppies I got from various sources. Most of them were acquired
from an auction-site regional to me, similar to eBay. They turned
out to be mostly Amiga formatted disks, but also contained the odd
IBM-formatted disk, and some Atari ST stuff as well. I had an Amiga
500, but never really used it much, since I got it very late. With
emulation being what it is, it is trivial to run the old stuff found
on these floppies on a modern system though. But, with hundreds of
dumped images, this turned out to be a real hassle. Because of this,
I recently started looking into different methods to look through
these dumps to find interesting files.
The tools I'm currently using is:
Greaseweazle v4 and Mitsumi 3,5" floppy drive
gw (python tools from greaseweazle github)
HXC's software to convert scp to adf
fs-uae to test software, look at demos etc
unadf from libadf to examine and extract files from adf
ancient, a colletion of decompression routines for ancient formats
This toolstack works well enough in most cases. The Greaseweazle is
normally connected to a small Linux computer I have in my workshop,
and I have both a 3,5" and 5,25" drive connected to it. In the case
of this Amiga disk-box I'm currently going through, I naturally
only use the 3,5" drive.
HXC's software is a bit clunky and I have to run it through wine since
I don't run Windows, but it's what I'm used to from before. I have
realized that I could probably replace it with the disk-utilities by
keirf, since I mostly use it to analyze the disk and convert
from scp to different formats.
Fs-uae is a very competent Emulator, and I have used it to Emulate
an A500 and A1200 with a harddrive to test different images. So far
it's been working well, but it is a slow process.
unadf is an example program from the libadf project that can be used
to access adf-images like an archive file, and extract all or some
files from it to my Linux workstation. This has proven to be a very
fast way to quickly dump a lot of images to different directories
and check through them with more or less automated tools.
Ancient is a nice program I found on github from user temisu. It
contains re-implementations of many old compression formats,
and can be very useful to access files that are extracted from the
adf-files. I have run into some instances where images and text-files
were compressed with power packer version 2, and the easiest way to
handle them was simply to run them through this tool to get to the
contents. It has also been helpful to identify compressed files that
libmagic couldn't see as anything else than "data".
So with all these tools, I have been able to find some interesting
things. So far, it has mostly been limited to art-projects for Deluxe
Paint and Documents for school or cheating at games, but some of this
data has been left on these discs since the 90's, and part of it is
unique. It's very time consuming, but interesting to look through
this small treasure trove, and I still have hundreds of disks from
the collection left to process.
In other news, I've been playing around more with the Pentium
II-system that I received some time ago. It has it's problems,
but I managed to do a complete install of Windows 98 with drivers
and everything working correctly. I had quite big issues doing the
same with Windows 95 on the same system. Windows 98 is also unstable
from time to time, and I am starting to suspect that the PSU is not
working well, or that I have other heat-related issues that I need to
take care of. I'll continue my experiments, but it's refreshing to
be able to play some old games using the Voodoo-card and have nice
acceleration and sound. Time to relive some old favorite games when
I manage to get it a bit more stable!
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