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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> ... about his quest to finish his own Commodore 64 CRPG from 1984. He will be able to do it, too, because he kept all the disks, tapes, notes, and hand-documented assembly code print-outs ever since his teenage project.

Nice! FWIW during the lockdown I happened, by chance, to be in alone, far from my family, in the house where I grew up. Well, not alone... My C128 was there. After watching tutorials on Youtube as to how to clean and grease the disk drive, I found out that a good 1/3rd to one half of my 5"1/4 floppies from the eighties could still be read 100%.

So I'm not surprised he could use old disks, in addition to his printed listings, to get back on his project!

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Last year I also did some attic cleaning and found boxes of all my disks and some CD's from before I moved away to college. I found floppy disks with files as old as about 1993, including one with some risque' saved pictures from p2p IRC file transfers, some chat logs, and whole program folders I had saved (because at that time 'backing up' things to me meant literally copying the program files folder from one computer to another).

Very surprisingly, every file I tried from every floppy loaded perfectly. Nothing says blast from the computing past like finding 16-color palette dithered GIFs of porn you hid as a 15 year old by saving them with obscured file extensions on boring beige floppy disks labeled 'WIN32 DLLs'.

> Very surprisingly, every file I tried from every floppy loaded perfectly.

I have noticed this as well. Floppies from the early 80s and 90s seemingly reading data perfectly fine. In fact, I can't recall the last time I remember running into a corrupted floppy.

I feel like my floppies have lasted longer than my CDs. The top coating on a lot of my CD-Rs from the very late 90s and early 2000s chip / wear off very easily today.

I was only able to install Lands of Lore (1993) a few times before one of the disks crapped out on me. It's the one devastating floppy failure that I remember =)

I remember that game.

It had a bug that required a patch to be able to complete, but that information wasn't really available to us so we hit a wall about 95% into the game and we couldn't complete it.

Even re-played the game from scratch in case we had missed something and hit the exact same wall again.

Years later I found the game on a ROM site and the patch disk was included there, but I had lost my save files and did not want to put the effort in to complete the game over from scratch.

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