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136 Comments
- Valujet, on 09/30/2008, -4/+762 formats one side.... sounds dirty.
- ogre2112, on 09/30/2008, -2/+60Someone take this guys geek ID card away from him!
- Soval, on 09/29/2008, -2/+58Just wow!
- donkevin, on 09/30/2008, -8/+59That's pretty cool stuff. Thanks for finding something good, MrBabyMan.
If only I understood digg's algorithm that lets EVERY one of your stories hit the front page. :P - protogenxl, on 09/30/2008, -0/+38A true example of "They don't make them like they used to."
- inactive, on 09/30/2008, -0/+36No, I'm pretty sure he did it by hand. Manipulating those litle magnetic bits with a pair of tweezers was a real bitch.
- Dean177, on 09/30/2008, -1/+37You clearly came to this site after its focus shifted away from technology, and towards more random crap.
Not understanding why its interesting means you dont really understand what it is. - FishHammer, on 09/30/2008, -2/+33This is awesome because I only have a Commodore 64 and all the good games are for IBM :(
- illDecree, on 09/30/2008, -0/+28No. It's a ***** floppy disk.
- inactive, on 09/30/2008, -2/+28Something your mom sucks on.
- johnflan, on 09/29/2008, -1/+26thats super cool!
- boerema, on 09/30/2008, -6/+28Why do people come to Digg just to whine about how Reddit is better? Just stay there and stop complaining.
- KSUdesigner, on 09/30/2008, -3/+23Funny how nobody cares...
- inactive, on 09/30/2008, -2/+19yes but you need to switch between a million or so of those floopies.
- bieber, on 09/30/2008, -3/+16To be fair, I'm sure the guy probably wrote some kind of tool to construct the disk, rather than doing it all "by hand." That being said, it's still pretty friggin amazing.
- inactive, on 09/30/2008, -1/+13Pretty cool story. First time I dugg a MBM or blog type article in a long time
- Scrappy1850, on 09/30/2008, -1/+12i ate a cereal one that had frosting on one side and shredded wheat on the other. it was delicious.
- diecastbeatdown, on 09/30/2008, -1/+12had a few disks like this as a kid. to run on my tandy 1000 and c64. it's not hard to create disks by sector, there were tools for it.
- KWhat, on 09/30/2008, -0/+11The size discrepancy could easily be solved by using what is commonly referred to as a hard link in the file allocation tables for both formats. Its definitely a creative use of space. I wish more programmers would stop with the modern mindset that ram and disk space are cheap. Thats how we ended up with word processors that are 2 gigs and web browsers that need 900mb of ram.
- TheNik, on 09/30/2008, -0/+11Awesome, two popular sites with similar content. Digg is a better site, no matter what anyone says, and really only because it looks like it wasn't made in 5 minutes on Frontpage.
- inactive, on 09/30/2008, -2/+12I would but reddit hurts my eyes after like 5 minutes
- jbmcb, on 09/30/2008, -1/+11Yeah, sector editors - but they usually only worked in one format or another - C64 or PC. He must have exported the binary dump of the commodore disk, brought it into the PC, hand-edited the table to use every other sector, then wrote the whole thing to a reference disk for replication.
A brilliant hack all around. - protogenxl, on 09/30/2008, -1/+11You keep saying it and I just keep not Caring.
- ultrafez, on 09/30/2008, -1/+11I don't care. I don't read reddit so STFU please.
- SSCrow, on 09/30/2008, -8/+17its called Reddit.
This was on Reddit yesterday. - Sakumi, on 09/30/2008, -0/+8Don't fault him directly, his script did it for him ;)
- misilman, on 09/30/2008, -2/+10Dont copy that floppy!.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-Xfqkdh5Js4 - Clbull, on 09/30/2008, -0/+8it hurts mine after 30 seconds. The layout is THAT bad
- ncc74656m, on 09/30/2008, -0/+8If people ever wonder why we loved the C64, it's ***** like this.
- inactive, on 09/30/2008, -1/+8Take the mysterious disk to engineer Deek Fizzlebizz in Loch Modan.
- inactive, on 09/30/2008, -0/+7there is a delete button, you know
- Junior612, on 09/30/2008, -0/+7It's OFFICIAL, the author's mind was blown!
- gramathy, on 09/30/2008, -1/+8Excuse me, but REAL programmers use butterflies.
- illDecree, on 09/30/2008, -0/+6floopies?
- PleaseJustDie, on 09/30/2008, -1/+7I had the same problem but after about 20 refreshes it came up so here is the article:
As an IBM PC historian, one aspect of my hobby is archiving gaming software. (You can take that statement to mean anything you want — whatever you think of, you’re probably right.) At the 2008 ECCC this past Saturday, a vendor wanted to offload his entire PC stock on me for $5, which I happily accepted since there was at least one title in there (Martian Memorandum) worth that much. When I got home, however, I found two additional Avantage (Accolade’s budget publishing title) titles that have not yet been released “into the wild”. This means there are no copies of these games floating around on Abandonware sites. For me, this was like finding actual gold nuggets in a collection of Pyrite.
The two games I got were Mental Blocks and Harrier7, so they join my third Avantage title Frightmare. I decided to archive all three properly, and it was when I got to Mental Blocks that I ran into something I’d never seen before: The manual for Mental Blocks claims that, for both C64 and IBM, you put the diskette in label-side up. I thought that had to be a typo, since every single mixed C64/IBM or Apple/IBM diskette I have ever seen is a “flippy” disk where one side is IBM and the other side is C64 or Apple — until I looked at the FAT12 for the disk and saw that tons of sectors in an interleaved pattern were marked as BAD — very strange usage.
The Incredibly Strange FAT of Mental Blocks That Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Formats
The Incredibly Strange FAT of Mental Blocks That Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Formats
A DIR on the disk shows that only about 256K of it is usable as space, instead of 360K. My Central Point Option Board’s Track Editor (TE.EXE) confirmed that every other track on side 0 cannot be identified as MFM data. So the manual is correct, and this truly is a mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette.
This diskette has officially blown my mind.
This is the very first time I have ever seen something like this. The data for the IBM program takes up more than 160KB as evidenced by a DIR. The C64 1541 drive is a single-sided drive; IBM’s is double-sided. Based on all this, we can deduce how this diskette is structured and why:
- The IBM version of the game required more than 160KB (ie. needed more than one side of a disk), probably because it has a set of files for CGA/Herc (4/2 colors) and another for EGA/Tandy (16 colors) and either set will fit in 160K but both won’t
- The C64 version required around 80K, based on the fact that every other track is unreadable by an IBM drive
- The publisher had the requirement of using only a single disk to save on packaging and media costs
- Not wanting to limit the game to either CGA or EGA, someone at Artech (the developer) built the format of this diskette BY HAND so that DOS would not step on the C64 tracks, and somehow the C64 would also read/boot the disk
I don’t know how the C64 portion boots since track 0 sector 0 looks like a DOS boot sector, but quick research shows that C64 disks keep their index on track 18. If anyone knows how C64 disks are read and boot, I’d love to know.
I think I need to go on a mission to discover who built the disk format(s) by hand to see what he was thinking. Did he work on it for weeks, feverishly trying to figure out how to meet the publisher’s demands? Or was he so brilliant that he did it all in a day or so, not thinking too much about it other than it was just another facet of his job? Fascinating stuff!
Just goes to show that you can still get surprises in this hobby after 25 years, even after being considered one of the top 20 “subject experts” for PC oldwarez. I guess you truly can never see it all. - dawnraid101, on 10/01/2008, -0/+6GTFO digg. Digg was once for geeks, now its for retards.
- OfficialJoe, on 09/30/2008, -1/+7Apparently over a thousands Diggers.
- Dunge, on 09/30/2008, -2/+8It was probably on slashdot way before.
- boerema, on 09/30/2008, -2/+8Uuugh. This isn't Youtube...try to construct a meaningful sentence.
- lexbaby, on 09/30/2008, -0/+6http://www.armory.com/~spectre/cwi/hl/
- inactive, on 09/30/2008, -0/+5And theres your one token tech topic to keep people from bitching about the "good ol days" of Digg.
- pe5t1lence, on 09/30/2008, -0/+5Wow, I always thought you couldn't trick the Trixster!
- megamod, on 09/30/2008, -0/+5May the Floppy BLOW YOUR MIND!
- devoss, on 09/30/2008, -0/+5Nothing new. We used to do something similar on the Apple ][ side mixing both 16 sector and 13 sector formats on the same side of a disk. Drove copy programs nuts.
- protogenxl, on 09/30/2008, -0/+5Again I am forced to ask the question when did Digg and Reddit merge and become two sites with a shared content pool?
- violentvinyl, on 09/30/2008, -0/+5Seems to me that if ALL programmers knew how to optimize code like that we'd have software that ran MUCH faster on current and legacy hardware. Maybe its not realistic, but implying that today's developers shouldn't study the problems their forebearers faced doesn't seem right either.
- Terasiel, on 09/30/2008, -3/+8This is even more confusing than discovering Windows XP and Ubuntu installed onto a single partition without the use of special software to emulate one or the other. How the hell would you do it without erasing the other?
- wxdotz, on 09/30/2008, -0/+5The issue with this particular disk is that both sides are readable by either. It wasn't each side unique to one type.
- jaredcat, on 09/30/2008, -0/+5Be thankful that storage is so cheap now that innovation can be spent in other areas.
Developers today don't need to spend all of their brainpower trying to fit 300KB worth of games on a single sided disk, or making the most efficient use of 32KB or RAM. - boerema, on 09/30/2008, -0/+4If you would have read the story, he explains it. The guy who crafted those disks went through the trouble of creating the disc architecture himself so that all pertinent data would be available in the correct area for each format. After you have the index table read, there isn't an issue for either formats to find its data. It is just like any other memory read operation.
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