Again To The Floppy – markround.com
Just a few months in the past, studying the information about Linux dropping support for floppy disks set off a complete bunch of reminiscences and feelings round this lengthy out of date and “lifeless” knowledge storage format. I hadn’t thought of or used floppy disks for round 20 odd years now, in some unspecified time in the future I will need to have copied my final disk however I actually can’t keep in mind what it was or when. The floppy disk was a kind of uncommon issues that turned a part of my on a regular basis life like my keys or college pencil-case. It was one thing from childhood and my early profession that was all over the place: Scattered by way of my college baggage, coat pockets and infrequently – if I used to be feeling organised – a disk field. And now, aside from a “save icon” meme, it’s gone.
For varied causes (largely as a result of I’ve simply change into a Dad!) I’ve been on fairly the memory journey lately and I made a decision to get reacquainted with this previous and quirky relic of my previous. Right here’s the primary of my disk packing containers now, filling up fairly properly with little 3.5” slices of nostalgia after just a few day’s value of changing my ADF assortment again into their authentic bodily type:
I’ll cowl the technical particulars of the “How” as per my typical Amiga blog posts however I need to discuss somewhat extra in regards to the “Why” side. Be warned, I’m going to ramble on barely greater than typical as I’m going on a meandering stroll down Nostalgia Avenue.
I received’t deny the comfort of instruments like WHDLoad however having almost each single Amiga sport and demo obtainable on the click on of a mouse has resulted in “the paralysis of selection”. I liken it to having a Spotify subscription: I’ve entry to just about the whole recorded output of each band, ever – however there’s simply a lot selection I often find yourself sticking to at least one or two playlists or placing it on random shuffle, invariably becoming bored midway by way of a track and endlessly skipping tracks till one thing catches my consideration.
There actually is one thing in regards to the act of getting a kind by way of the disk assortment and selecting one thing out akin to the ritual of pulling a vinyl file from it’s sleeve and inserting it on the turntable. And the noises! That “schonk.. chonk…” because the disks slid in, adopted by the “chnk…chnk…chnk…ddddddrrrrr..chnk…chnk” noises… So satisfying!
All these years on and it appears stranger nonetheless that this literal icon of out of date know-how as soon as appeared like the long run to me. Coming from a cassette tape-loading Sinclair ZX Spectrum, after I was youthful the floppy disk was symbolic of the then next-gen programs just like the Amiga. I began accumulating and buying and selling video games and demo disks with college pals in anticipation earlier than I even bought my first A600. In any case, the floppy disk was actually the very first thing you noticed while you switched in your Amiga, displayed proper there on the boot display screen:
Then from Kickstart 2.0 onwards we bought the funky animated model:
Demo teams parodied it and riffed on it:
While fortunately a rattling sight sooner than loading from cassette tape, most video games would have a display screen like this someplace to remind you that they have been truly doing one thing and never simply aimlessly clicking away for a number of seconds:
And naturally, with out the floppy, we’d by no means have been “handled” to the cultural milestone that’s MC Double-Def D.P. performing “Don’t Copy That Floppy”. That is presumably probably the most awkward 90s factor I’ve ever seen – and that’s coming from somebody who as soon as wore a shell-suit, World Hypercolor t-shirt and Hello-Tec basketball boots on the similar time (yeah, it was a special period…):
When you’ve by no means seen it earlier than, I problem you to attempt to make it the entire approach by way of. It’s simply… it’s superb.
There have been different rituals related to the floppy too; after I lately bought my first new packs of disks in nicely over twenty years, I realised how a lot I had missed the ceremony of labelling them! Right here’s my recent provide, midway by way of being stickered up:
I keep in mind there was one thing simply so satisfying about lining up the labels good and naturally, deciding when a specific disk was necessary sufficient to warrant the everlasting pen as an alternative of getting a tentative pencil scribble on the label. And even, for these choose few disks I made for closest pals, I’d enhance the label with some home-made paintings in the identical painstaking approach often reserved for my most necessary mix-tape covers.
Even these favorite disks sometimes needed to be recycled; I often ended up operating out of clean disks in some unspecified time in the future after which a good friend would come over with one thing so cool I simply had to repeat it after which…. Nicely, time to select a sacrificial sufferer and write over it. I’m certain all of us had disks that ended up wanting like this:
Which led to an interesting geological-type impact, the place the strata of earlier video games and demos have been left uncovered however scribbled out out of your historical past of pursuits. You might see what provenance that disk had, keep in mind gaming classes of previous and look again in time like some form of 16-bit archaeologist sifting by way of ruins. Journal coverdisks often suffered this destiny with me. As a subscriber to varied Amiga magazines I used to be assured a month-to-month provide of recent disks which I may re-label and put again into use by the previous “hack” of taping over the write-protect gap.
One of many attention-grabbing side-effects of floppy disks being an precise, bodily medium is that you just wanted a way of acquiring and exchanging them. This in flip I feel actually helped the early computing scene change into a lot extra private than the trendy period the place the whole lot is a fast obtain away.
Other than the custom of visiting your mates home and having previous rifle by way of their disk-box to seek out issues of curiosity, there wasn’t a straightforward approach to pay money for new software program like there may be now. Again within the day, no-one was “on-line” and only a few of my pals had modems. People who did often additionally had PCs which couldn’t learn or write Amiga floppies. We due to this fact often couldn’t merely obtain the software program we wished, which led to the proliferation of PD Libraries which marketed their wares in most magazines of the day. A typical instance is that this full-page advert from “17-bit Software program” (which was curiously sufficient the roots of the legendary Team 17 video games writer which introduced us the likes of Alien Breed and Venture-X)
Flicking by way of the back-pages of Amiga Format and CU Amiga was an everyday past-time for me; I’d fastidiously learn all of the adverts, circling the titles that sounded probably the most attention-grabbing after which go and pester my Mum to cellphone them up and pay utilizing her card over the cellphone. I’d then wait in pleasure over the following few days for the postman to ship the disks – it was at all times day when simply earlier than college, one in all these dangerous boys would land on the doormat:
Afterward, after I finally bought concerned in The Scene, floppies introduced us collectively in a approach I feel is now sadly long-gone. As a result of we traded disks with one another – and teams sometimes had members whose sole “job” within the group was as a “dealer” or “swapper” – we additionally wrote to one another. As a very awkward teenager (with a bunch of the standard teen points and a wholesome side-order of angst), among the closest friendships I fashioned throughout these years have been with the opposite members of my group. Alongside the floppy disks we’d write lengthy, rambling letters to one another stuffed with the whole lot and nothing. We’d fill our envelopes to one another with “Jiffy Junk” – little trinkets we’d acquire and swap: Kinder shock toys, buying and selling playing cards and the occasional mix-tape. Because the splash display screen from an previous disk journal stated:
Regardless that I feel I solely ever met one of many guys from my group in individual, I nonetheless take into consideration them typically to at the present time and surprise what they’re all doing now.
Because the Amiga scene steadily died and the BBS (and later, the Web and FTP websites) turned the first technique of acquiring software program I feel numerous these friendships have been damaged. Regardless that The Scene remains to be a really close-knit neighborhood, I’d have an interest to know whether or not those self same bonds exist right this moment when most communication might be digital in nature.
So, now all the way down to enterprise (skip to the “However significantly, why?” part beneath for extra of my musings if you wish to gloss over the technical particulars). My A1200 had been fitted with a HXC Floppy emulator: a nifty little gadget that masses ADF information from a SD card and plugs into the floppy socket on the motherboard. I’d put in this years in the past for the sake of comfort and is what I had been utilizing for a “floppy drive”. This needed to be disconnected and I additionally needed to make a cardboard insulating cowl to defend the Indivision AGA DVI card which sits proper beneath the place the brand new drive was going to take a seat.
I bought a refurbished floppy from amigastore.eu which I then put in :
Happily it sat safe sufficient with all the opposite cables round it, nevertheless it ought to have had somewhat bracket holding it in. It’s working high quality now although with out it and because it was a really tight match with all my different expansions, I don’t a lot fancy opening all of it again up any time quickly! After somewhat fidgeting with energy provides and dealing which approach around the ribbon cables have been purported to go, it began up and proceeded to chunter away with that common “click on” of the Amiga ready to detect a disk being inserted. Hurrah!
Now, to feed it.
There’s two kinds of floppy in circulation you should utilize along with your Amiga. The primary kind is the native Double Density (DD) kind which on the PC may assist 720Kb of information and on the Amiga 880Kb. Though later Amiga fashions did typically include a Excessive-Density drive, this DD kind was by far the most typical kind of disk in circulation on the time. They’ll work with out situation in any Amiga drive however they’re additionally the toughest to come back by lately; the one dependable supply for brand new DD disks I’ve discovered to date is from sellers on eBay. There are additionally loads of “bucket of random journal coverdisks and pirated video games” auctions as nicely if you wish to get actually low cost.
The second kind is the far-more widespread Excessive Density (HD) kind that the majority PCs used with a capability of 1.44Mb. Once more although, as they’re not being produced they’re now comparatively costly. You’ll be able to nonetheless purchase these model new although, on websites like Amazon however there’s a draw-back. They use a totally completely different magnetic medium than the DD kind with completely different traits and as such they might or could not work reliably.
I attempted 3 completely different batches purchased from Amazon with blended outcomes. I purchased a pack every of rainbow-coloured and plain black disks manufactured by Verbatim, Plain black disks from Sony, and a field of mixed-colour disks from 3M. To be able to get these working I found probably the most dependable technique was to make use of XCopy to format them a number of occasions in my exterior Cumana CAX354 drive.
I purchased this drive from eBay as I wished to recreate my then-pimpin’ twin drive setup I had on my first A1200. I feel the write mechanism on this drive is one way or the other “stronger” than in my inside drive as I had quite a bit much less points as soon as I used this to do the preliminary formatting. Right here it’s crunching by way of a X-Copy (Yeah!) format and confirm:
As soon as I’d formatted and verified the disks every time, they often labored OK however on common there appears to be 1 or 2 “dangerous” disks in every batch that both refuse to be formatted or finally begin throwing CRC errors.
I additionally wanted some additional software program instruments to transform issues backwards and forwards. As my A1200 is linked to the Web I went over to Aminet. There are various related instruments there however one I stored seeing beneficial was TrackSaver GUI which may write all my ADF information again to an actual floppy. It has a quite simple GUI which takes care of studying and writing floppy pictures:
In addition to ADF information it may additionally deal with DiskMasher DMS archives which have been generally used on the Amiga again within the 90s. I keep in mind this output was a standard sight on journal coverdisks and BBS downloads:
TURBO GENERIC, certainly. One last item to contemplate could be a virus-scanner of some kind. The Amiga bootsector virus was fairly the factor again within the day, and it nonetheless persists on some ADF sources or previous floppy pictures. It’s uncommon nevertheless it’d be an actual disgrace to screw up a system by doing the digital equal of re-introducing smallpox. Once more, Aminet has plenty to select from.
I’ve been considering quite a bit lately about what it’s precisely in regards to the Amiga that captures me in a approach that no different pc ever did. A part of it’s I feel as a result of the Amiga was the final system that was easy sufficient that one individual may moderately maintain the whole machine of their head.
It was advanced, true, however with sufficient learning and time you can know just about the whole lot about each single little bit of the Amiga’s reminiscence area, workbench, the customized chips and so forth. That’s what makes it so particular and endearing.
That merely doesn’t exist on different platforms. I imply fashionable programs are superb – and I’ve labored on some severe big-iron {hardware} in my time – however you can spend a complete lifetime now merely changing into an knowledgeable in a single tiny piece of the entire system. Fashionable computer systems simply don’t have the accessibility that the Amiga had, and it straddled the divide completely between being easy sufficient to comprehend it and adore it, but highly effective sufficient to do stuff you’d by no means dreamed potential.
However I might additionally counsel that an much more necessary side is the neighborhood that grew up round it – which was made potential in an enormous approach by the common-or-garden floppy disk. It enabled a complete technology of bed room coders to succeed in out to the world, sending their software program across the globe and making actual connections. Just like the bootleg tape scene of the 80s we traded disks, wrote letters, made pals and linked in a approach that now, just like the floppy itself, appears antiquated. Nevertheless it was numerous enjoyable whereas it lasted!
XCopy for all times, yo.