Strange Q: Anyone in the Seattle area own an Amiga?

[elfs]

It's bloody unlikely that any of them are readable, but I have a paper bag full of Amiga disks. My Amiga long since died, but I do have legal copies of the ROM and Workbench disks, along with some of my favorite games from that era (Full Metal Planet and the orginal Bard's Tale).

But on one of those floppies, somewhere, are a pair of lost Journal Entries. I want them back. I also wouldn't mind finding my old copy of Scribble!, which I don't have a copy of.

Comments

[shadowfey.livejournal.com]

Somewhere I have a bunch of floppies for the Apple II+. Not the IIe; the word processor program on the IIe would read the discs, but without spacing between paragraphs and all in caps.

I wish I could get those early writings back, but alas.

[ambrose-m.livejournal.com]

Five and a half inch soft sectored... right?

A.M.

I have one, sort-of...

[-pollox.livejournal.com]

I picked up a used amiga in pieces out of someone's storeroom cheap a few years ago; in theory it's complete, but I've never set it up...

[(Anonymous)]

What I *think* I remember is that Macs used the freaky 800k format, but both Amigas and PCs used the 720k format. If that's true, then perhaps sticking the disks in a PC and using "strings" on the floppy device might yield something?

[solarbird]

5.25" was 8-bit talk outside the PC world. (And, okay, the Lisa.) Amiga is 3.5" soft-sectored 880K DD/DS. The HD/DS drives that came later were predictably 1.76M.

And yes, I have a complete Amiga system that can be set up and run. Even more amazing: it talks TCP over ethernet. It hasn't been powered up in a year and a half, but it should still run just fine. No browser, tho'. If I remember correctly, I also had a PC floppy format driver, so if you have PC-format floppies, we can copy to desktop and then to PC floppy.

[solarbird]

Amigas natively used an 880K freaky GCM-like format of all their very own, but with special drivers could read and write 720K PC floppies. Then the later Amigas had 1.76M HD drives that could also read/write 1.44M PC floppies, again with special drivers.

The Atari ST, on the other hand, used the PC 720K format. That's probably what you're remembering.

God damn I was way too much into this crap in the 80s.

[kengr]

And the CopyIIPC deluxe option board would let you read all those formats and more. :-)

[riverheart.livejournal.com]

How old? I gave skydancer and caeled most of Bob's old Old Computer Museum stuff, for their own version of same, about three years ago. One of those pieces of equipment was a working (AFAIK) Amiga 1000.

Ping one or the other and see if it can handle this.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

This seems like an opportunity for Computer Museums: obsolete format media data recovery. They'd want to get good at it for research purposes, too.