How the data was extracted from the Prince floppy disk and uploaded to the Internet archive

The photo in the article looks like an old Apple laptop.

So my “they just put it In a drive and opened it” still applies. I just got the wrong device.

It’s still a misleading title.

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tenor (10)

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So will you.

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As a related side note, why Prince changed his name to a glyph with no pronunciation or spelling:

…The symbol was a rebellion against Prince’s record label, Warner Bros. He first signed with the company back in 1977 when he was still a teenager, and together they produced some of his most famous titles

But after inking a new deal in the early 1990s, Prince chafed under the company’s rigid production schedule. A prolific songwriter, he wanted to release material as soon as it was ready… But Warner Bros refused, believing it would saturate the market and dilute demand for the artist’s music.…
Prince compared his contractual obligations to slavery, and began performing with the word “SLAVE” on his cheek. He saw his own name as a part of his contractual entrapment.
“Warner Bros took the name, trademarked it, and used it as the main marketing took to promote all of the music I wrote,” Prince once said[ in a press release…. “The company owns the name Prince and all related music marketed under Prince. I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Bros.”… Source: BBC, Why did Prince change his name to a symbol?, BBC.com, Jessica Lussenhop, 2016 04 22: A good and short read with sources noted. This truncated set of quotes from the article gives a TLDR synopsis, the the short article has a lot of good “meat” that give more depth about the decision.

I wonder what the hinting is like for when it is represented as a small glyph.

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All modern fonts are basically collections of individual vector files representing each glyph, so I would assume you could easily convert the font file into a format that could be interpreted by a CNC machine.

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The original font was in a Font Suitcase file that is not used anymore.

The font also was available in the game Prince Interactive and can be found here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821030

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Floppy recovery long story short = if it still works OK and is in a format your computer can read just get a USB floppy drive, else get a CryoFlux drive

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Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time…
https://kryoflux.com

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If it was an old 800KB Mac formatted floppy they could use a Kryoflux (or similar device) with an off-the-shelf 3.5” FDD on a modern computer over USB.

I was able to extract the contents of hundreds of old 800KB-formatted Mac flopppies on a Windows PC this way a few years back.

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sparta meloncamp

i guess the reason i clicked was because i have some old mac disks from the early 90s. last time i tried to read them was with a g3 tower that still had a drive like that but it couldnt read them. i dunno if the disks were corrupt or if the newer os couldnt read them. i think i need one of those old 128k macs but i dont know anyone with a working one anymore.

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Yeah weirdly the current mac OS is better at mounting ancient windows formats than slightly old Mac ones. I’m currently trying to figure out how to rip stuff from some Mac-formatted CDrs from like 20 years ago which it won’y accept because they are HFS not HFS+. :frowning:

For floppies, HD ones should work with a USB floppy drive but 800k ones or other olde formats need Kryoflux or GreaseWeazle which are fairly affordable somewhat techy devices which allow you to connect various different types of drive to a modern computer and rip the data at incredibly detailed levels to recover damaged or just plain incompatible files and convert to something you can open in an emulator

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I’ve recovered a bunch of Amiga disks that way too (including severely damaged ones by re-ripping 100s of times till it figure out what the faded signals were supposed to mean), highly recommend kryoflux

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Take a disk image with dd (make sure to use conv=noerror!) and you’re 99% of the way there. If there’s only a single file it should be easy to find with a hex editor ignoring the filesystem entirely. But I assume Linux has a filesystem module for whatever old filesystem (HFS?) is on the disk anyway.

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