10 years ago I heard “you’d better read all the floppy disks you’ve got now because you won’t be able to do it later.” You might do better with better hardware, you might not. This thing can get at the raw data
Neat! Thank you for the info on that one. Bookmarked!
Before I spend well over $100 importing that device, I previously was thinking of brining up a 2001 era motherboard with a USB stack and can natively host the drives, but the 486 that has sat unused may be a solid option. I presumably can find a way to transfer data to a modern system over serial cable or something.
Learning Company software has been pretty well archived at this point. To me, the easiest approach would be to hold onto the original box/packaging for sentimental purposes, and just find a copy of it on a site like the Internet Archive.
If your goal is to use it on a period-correct system, I’d go with 34/40pin adapters that lets you read flash cards, USB, etc.
A lot of my friends have kept their old 486 computers, and everything is period-correct except for the hard drive and floppy drive which have been replaced with a CF-to-IDE for the HDD and Gotek running FlashFloppy firmware for the 3.5".
Old diskettes can be a problem especially storage that suits the white menace bacterial / fungus that can grow on the surface and cleaning can sometimes remedy but unless it's spots that can be got though the window with an ear bud, disassembly is required.
The thing I'd recommend is search of an image of the disks if they exist. Next best is an emulation eg [1] [2] which I found by way of google and yandex
10 years ago I heard “you’d better read all the floppy disks you’ve got now because you won’t be able to do it later.” You might do better with better hardware, you might not. This thing can get at the raw data
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KryoFlux
which might let you get most of the bits from a bad block. See
https://goughlui.com/2013/04/21/project-kryoflux-part-1-the-...
Neat! Thank you for the info on that one. Bookmarked!
Before I spend well over $100 importing that device, I previously was thinking of brining up a 2001 era motherboard with a USB stack and can natively host the drives, but the 486 that has sat unused may be a solid option. I presumably can find a way to transfer data to a modern system over serial cable or something.
Learning Company software has been pretty well archived at this point. To me, the easiest approach would be to hold onto the original box/packaging for sentimental purposes, and just find a copy of it on a site like the Internet Archive.
If your goal is to use it on a period-correct system, I’d go with 34/40pin adapters that lets you read flash cards, USB, etc.
A lot of my friends have kept their old 486 computers, and everything is period-correct except for the hard drive and floppy drive which have been replaced with a CF-to-IDE for the HDD and Gotek running FlashFloppy firmware for the 3.5".
Old diskettes can be a problem especially storage that suits the white menace bacterial / fungus that can grow on the surface and cleaning can sometimes remedy but unless it's spots that can be got though the window with an ear bud, disassembly is required.
The thing I'd recommend is search of an image of the disks if they exist. Next best is an emulation eg [1] [2] which I found by way of google and yandex
[1] https://www.abandonwaredos.com/abandonware-game.php?abandonw... [2] https://archive.org/details/super-solvers-spellbound-dos-en-...
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