Hacker News Reader

Comment by wcarss | Hacker News Reader

(Under the original title) I was selfishly hoping this would have links to runnable Amiga demos :)

We've had our Amiga 1000 out of the closet for the last 6 months and after our C compiler disks all mysteriously stopped working at once, we've run out of things to do with it for the moment.

View on HN

Sadly floppy disks will lose their magnetism over time. There will be a point in the not too distant future that all original copies of computer work on floppy are dead forever. If you have any old disks with old data, now (or realistically 10 years ago) is the time to get them backed up somewhere safe.

Yeah. During the lockdown I was stuck by "chance" alone at my parents' old house, the one were I grew up. I found my old C128 (which I'd use in C64 mode all the time) and cleaned it, cleaned its disk drive, cleaned my floppies and tried them. To my surprise about 2 out of 3 were still working (they're a bit more than 30 years old). Heck, I even found a "New In Unopened Box" of 5"1/4 floppies and started making a few copies of some of the disks that were still working (out of boredom and curiosity more than to save data).

It's kind of terrible that copyright for those will probably last an order of magnitude longer than the actual media will.

At least one EULA for a major PC software product stated that the terms of the license lasted for fifty (50) years, after which the licensee was obligated to return the distribution media to the vendor.

So yeah, if you're still using dBASE III in the 2030s, you are technically obligated to stop doing so and return your demagnetized floppies to a defunct company!

The floppy drive was rekt in my Amiga 500 when I bought it. I decided that I wanted to run the Amiga rather than have it serve as a museum piece, so I replaced the floppy drive with a Gotek floppy emulator and installed the open source FlashFloppy firmware on it, and I can now use USB sticks with floppy images and the Amiga thinks it's a real disk. Breathes life into the old hardware.

Time to get a usb to amiga disk drive emulator? I know they exist, and a quick google search turned one up.

I have a friend who got an fpga amiga emulator, and after about a month finally got the thing to do proper smooth scrolling on a modern LCD monitor. I'd heard him talk about demo scene scrolling, and I'd believed him, but seeing the same output on 2 different monitors, one with the proper low latency+variance that the amiga had, and the other not, and it was not even close, low frame rate on both too...

Anyways, I suspect a disk drive emulator will be easier to get working than on new amiga platforms, and these demos definitely exist out there.

Taken a look through http://www.pouet.net/ ?

Looks like both Amiga and PC demos available there.

Spent a nostalgic time running through some of the older PC demos I remembered. Most run fine on DOSBox!

Retro computing communities are pretty active at the moment. You should be able to get copies of software via disk drive emulation. There’s various SD Card options out there for the C64, so I imagine the Amiga is similar. I was playing with a racket c64 compiler the other day, so I figure the amiga has something cool.

GoTek external floppy drive emulator is the easiest and cheapest way to get files of your old Amiga floppies, assuming you have a working Amiga.

If you dont have working Amiga it gets more expensive and/or complicated.

Look into GreaseWeazle and FlashFloppy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com