I’m so happy to live in a world where “forensic analysis of a computer for narrative purposes” games are a genre now.
FWIW, A few dollars on ebay will buy you some used bare HDDs. I’ve never received a used HDD that had been formatted, so you can play this game for reals. Plug the drive into an enclosure, and take a peek. Will you find personal files and social security numbers? Will you find a company’s taxes going back years? Will you find kiddie porn?* Will you find some bespoke DOS program of curious purpose? Will you be able to reconstruct someone’s life in uncomfortable detail? All of the above?
(Will someone reading this decide instead to load up their old drives with curiosity-inducing folders full of viruses and stick them on ebay? 
)
*Careful with that - mere possession is a crime in many places, so not being aware that some has been slipped into your possession without your knowledge probably isn’t a defense you want to have to test…
Explore a mysterious hard drive and reconstruct a broken world
Seriously, that’s just a concise description of my daily life!
I was expected a command prompt driven mystery, but all of a sudden the cli developed 3D capabilities. Interesting concept for a game, but I would have been happier to just explore from the terminal.
It may not take the hard data approach that I suspect you want, but watch out for forthcoming game Cibele if you want to explore someone else’s life through their files.
That said, I played the demo for Memory of a Broken Dimension years ago and am extremely excited about it seemingly being kind of maybe close to being finished.
[quote=“Archvillain, post:3, topic:68310, full:true”]
FWIW, A few dollars on ebay will buy you some used bare HDDs. I’ve never received a used HDD that had been formatted, so you can play this game for reals. Plug the drive into an enclosure, and take a peek. [/quote]
One of my friends bought an LGP-21 computer from the Black Hole surplus store in Los Alamos. Dating from the mid-sixties, it has a 4K disk memory, which doubtless has some program on it. He hasn’t powered up the system because that’s a major undertaking, but there could be all sorts of nuclear secrets therein. Or not. Probably not.
Removing and replacing HDs in my computers has always been a good excuse to get out the toolbag and crack open the HD enclosure to play with the shiny bits (and ultimately to break them into tiny shiny bits).
And now you’ve made me wonder about checking ebay for said drives…
If it’s about the basic building-blocks of the universe, it can’t be all that secret!
I found a hard drive next to a copy machine in a vacant lot. Still need to fire it up under Linux to see what’s contained therein.
Ohh, you lucky dog!
EDIT: You using a usb drive enclosure for this, or are you adding the drive via SCSI cable and fstab?
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