God I loved that game. Best game soundtrack ever.
But, as you well know, it came on CD. It would take a few hundred 1.44MB floppies to install it if that were an option.
/The sequel and the Playstation port were unfortunately less good.
The system in the photo looks a lot like a Kaypro, which IMHO was the best of the CP/M luggables.
(My wife, who owned an Osborne, would doubtless fight me over such a scurrilous claim.)
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Two and thoughts as to why it took so long.
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Steve Jobs once pointed out that there’s a 10x or 20x gap in skill level between the best programmers and an average programmer. One day for you might be 3 months for someone else. If the data recovery tech is used to just using tools to scrape data off the disk, then deducing the file system from first principles might have been a challenge for them.
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More charitably to the data recovery tech, we don’t know what this computer was under the hood. Home built from a kit or from parts, yes, but was it CP/M or was it some other flavour – something obscure that never sold well and that hardly anybody today outside of a few museum curators remembers at all?
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Yes, they doubtless have a toolset that covers all the standard formats. The logical conclusion is that this was something quite unusual, not covered by their toolset, which means they had to spend a long time figuring it out from scratch.
- Yeah, there were kits, and then a step up in nerdiness from that was building something from components you got individually. All we know is that a) Roddenberry built it himself, and b) a professional data recovery firm was stumped by the disk format for 3 months. Maybe it was non-standard/customized to some degree, or maybe it was something just really obscure and forgotten today.
As to the hardware providing clues - maybe, maybe not. Depends on whether the thing that stumped them was the disk format or the software/directory format. Anyway, they didn’t have access to it – maybe the family didn’t want to ship a valuable (auctionable) asset off to the data recovery firm no matter what.
The original PR Newswire article, which requires a bit of chasing down, states that it’s a custom O/S and a custom word-processing program, but they are standard 5" DD-DS disks of 160k capacity.
They took six months to read 200 floppies. My guess is that this was someone’s pet project, not a paid gig.
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It’s not quite as old, but my Atari 8-bit can still load Bruce Lee from the original floppy.
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A way to get the data from any unknown disk to a computer could be attaching an amplifier to the head output, and plugging it to a sound card; some are capable of 192 kHz samplerate. (If the data rate is too high, you can then slow down the spindle. Or you can leverage the fact that the signal has fairly low dynamic range, and use one of those digital scopes based on the Cypress CY7C68013-56PVC (FX2) chip, these can go to 24 MHz samplerate at 8 bit, continuous feed.
Then microstep the head. That will take care of optional nonstandard track width.
Then unleash custom-written DSP software (the demodulation itself should be easy, the removal of distortion and degradation may be more difficult; but you can read the track many times and then average out or use the best-result read or whatever, or even combine data from multiple head microstep positions if only part of the track is damaged).
Thought… if the drive head is replaced with something more modern, e.g. a GMR head from a hard drive, could this yield a de-facto magnetic microscope for advanced magnetic imaging of the floppies for kick-ass level of data recovery? This could possibly even recover data from earlier writes…
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Slight correction here - the computers were custom made FOR Gene Roddenberry, not BY him. He did not make his own computers. Still, the hardware and software were completely proprietary and unique.
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My bet is on ASCII porn. With aliens!
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…of green women!!!
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Would you still happen to have it? I have a bunch of CP/M formatted 5.25 disks from an old DEC Robin. The floppies are still OK as of last use a decade ago, but the OS disk (and WPS-80 application) floppies are long gone.
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