Re: Rescuing old 5.25" disks

["sicklittlemonkey" <Nick.Westgate@gmail.com>]

Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
> [note crossposting]

I think this could stay in c.s.a2, which has the largest audience.

> But most of those images are in the dsk/do/po or nib formats. That's bad.
> It's bad because those formats fail to preserve information about the disks
> that is sometimes important, and it's *really* bad for two other reasons:

Agreed. Some cracks _do_ omit intros etc, and now that most cracks have
been preserved the originals deserve no less.

> This needs to be done. It should have been done a decade ago, but it's never
> too late. I don't think it's very hard. Comments requested.

Again, I agree, but 10 years ago images were captured for emulation,
and even with just DSK emulation it took a decent machine for an
emulator to run at 1MHz. (I know, I co-wrote a couple.) Anyway, true
fidelity is within reach these days.

Bill's comment that "There already exists a card which reads the
bitstream of a 5.25, The Disk II." is not exactly true, as noted in the
other thread currently running on c.s.a2. The EDD+ card allows capture
of the raw bitstream before processing by the Disk Controller II's
state machine.

http://www.apple2info.net/hardware/edd/edd.htm

Cheers,
Nick.