This guy <a href="https://twitter.com/a2_4am?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/a2_4am?lang=en</a> has been posting apple II woz files for a while and I know there is an Atari format as well.<p>Cool stuff.
One day we'll eventually run out of ancient drives that can read their floppies, but the media could be still readable using other means. I would love to see a plain scanner like device that reads magnetic fields instead of light reflections, that is, something that slowly scans the entire surface of the media [1] just like a scanner then builds a pattern of tracks and sectors keeping track (pun unintended) of its position, then proceeds to map them into data thanks to a database describing how data structure is arranged by different brands/disk formats/filesystems/etc.
We wouldn't need either speed or realtime reading; being able to read and decypher an ancient disk in 3 days of multiple passes to correct errors, would still make it a success. A (very) small rotating head would likely work here. Did anyone ever attempt to do something similar?<p>[1] The magnetic media should be removed from the disk body, that is, the disk would stand still in the "scanner" while the head(s) would slowly do multiple passes to map the remnants of its magnetic data.
This would eliminate the requirement for custom readers for very rare floppies, say like those 2" ones I can't even remember where I saw them (possibly a musical instrument from the 80s).
This is fantastic! Never used a Commodore, but this is familiar enough for a DOS user from the 5-1/4" floppy era.<p>Would love to see something similar for ZX Spectrum tapes :)
Lovely visualization of knowledge that is only usually obtained through low-level spleunking.<p>I'd love to see visualizations of some of the encryption approaches used on the Apple ][, where sector alignment was shifted, file table indexeas moved, data interleaving, etc. This was all possible due to the soft-sectored disks and timings determined in software (Woz's genius move to reduce chip count!)
I could never wrap my mind around what was happening to the data.
Somebody make something like this for DOS floppies please. It'd be great to see visualizations of normally formatted 1440KiB floppies vs. 1680KiB DMF ones.
C64 disks with custom loaders (read: games disks) were so fascinating to me as a kid because the sounds of the 1541 drive would change as soon as that fastloader code activated. Lots of game disks had their own unique loading sound signature.<p>I would love to see a comparison of 80s floppy disk drives. Lots of genius designs within... except the 1541's terrible bug which was never fixed due to backwards compatibility.