There are many solutions to image old floppies on a very low, flux based level: Kryoflux, Catweasel, Fluxengine or Supercard Pro, to name a few. The Greaseweazle is a low cost, open source variant that can be had for less than 10 EUR. It is suitable to generate disk images of a wide variety of formats, including but not limited to IBM PC, Atari ST, C64 and Amiga. In this video you can see me test the device and create a pipeline for more or less easy creation of different disk images. In theory you can even salvage data off of damaged disks. This heavily depends on how much of the disk is still readable though, and you should weigh your options carefully if the data in question is really valuable, of course.
Month: October 2020
Playing Game Music without a PC: The Roland SB55
Roland produced a number of SoundCanvas and related products. The SoundCanvas 55 came with an optional device called the SoundBrush 55. This was a floppy based MIDI recorder and player. Musicians could use it to either play back MIDI files or alternatively to record their performances. We will of course use the device to play back video game music without the need of a PC! I will have a look inside this device, which is well over 25 years old and also will hook it up to my SC55 and the MT32.
Pimping the C64
A good friend of the channel by the name of matze79 supplied me with a rather cheap C64G. As I didn’t own a C64 at the moment, this was an excellent opportunity. The poort little C64 came with two missing keys, which were fixed by 3D printed replacements. While this looks interesting and is impressive in its own right, I wanted a more long lasting fix. The C64 was also missing its SID chip and came with a nice little SwinSID. But again, we have some better replacement on hand! So let’s open up the machine, fix those things and enjoy the fantastic world of programs the C64 has to offer!