Oolite Bulletins

Griff wrote:

I dont think i ever saw a C64 disk drive, i only had that 'datasette' tape drive or what ever it was called - in it's later years i had to rest a heavy book on top of it when loading up a game, seemed to help it some how!

My ZX Spectrum was desparately temperamental about loading from cassette. When I bought The Hobbit game for it, it would fail right toward the end of loading. IIRC that took about 15 or 20 minutes (was it really that long?).

The cassette player was a really flash, multi-band, wide-stereo, 'casseiver' which I had bought after saving up my 5 weeks holiday pay working for the council in the summer.

At the 5th or 6th attempt at getting the game to load, and failing, I got angry and broke the radio cassette player.

It turned out my brother's very old, tired, battered portable tape player worked fine.

Just to add insult to injury, it only took me about 3½ hours to finish The Hobbit, including drawing up an entire map of the game. But when I took those hand-drawn maps into college the next day for others to copy, I was hailed as a hero.

While we are on the subject of drives I got sent this link. It must have taken a while to organise.

Listen to this (YouTube).

SandJ wrote:

IIRC that took about 15 or 20 minutes (was it really that long?)

I remember a game called China Miner that took about 40 mins. to load, and for about the last, tense 5 mins of that i'd start doing superstitious good luck charms and prayers, i can't remember what they were but probably stuff like sit very still, don't look directly at the datasette etc

Griff wrote:

and for about the last, tense 5 mins of that i'd start doing superstitious good luck charms and prayers,

Not unlike installing MS Office from thirty-two 3.5 floppies, knowing it had a habit of failing round about disk #27/28!

That's why the BBC was so cool. It did a crc check on each block, and if it failed it told you to rewind and try again.
Don't get me started on 'Ram-Pack wobble' on the ZX81.

I wonder how many floppy disks M$ orifice takes now...

Greyth wrote:

I wonder how many floppy disks M$ orifice takes now...

Or even how many C90's!!!

Greyth wrote:

I wonder how many floppy disks M$ orifice takes now...

Have you got access to a machine that could take them? My main desktop can, but if I want to use a 5¼" disk I'll need to remove the CD drive and re-fit the full height drive I still hang on to just in case.

Sadly, I traded my unopened 8" floppy WordStar installation disk for a packet of plain chocolate HobNob biscuits.

And I never thought to make a copy of the 12" floppy boot disk for the ICL ME29. 12" floppies don't even get a mention on Wikipedia's History of the floppy disk nor Floppy disk variants

12 inch! I bet that truly was floppy... I still have a BBCB somewhere with the 51/4 floppy and an Atari ST with the 3.5.

I still have both my floppy drives for my C64s - the original 1541 and an Evesham Micros Excellerator+ and several hundred 5.25" floppies - all with an extra slot cut out on the other side of the pre-cut one - which made the C64 floppies double sided - saved me a fortune that did!

DaddyHoggy wrote:

- which made the C64 floppies double sided -

Sort of flip-floppies

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I still have both my floppy drives for my C64s - the original 1541 and an Evesham Micros Excellerator+ and several hundred 5.25" floppies - all with an extra slot cut out on the other side of the pre-cut one - which made the C64 floppies double sided - saved me a fortune that did!

Indeed. They were selling cutters for that very purpose at the time.

Every once in a while you had a floppy which couldn't be formatted on the back side. But usually they worked well either way.

Commander McLane wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I still have both my floppy drives for my C64s - the original 1541 and an Evesham Micros Excellerator+ and several hundred 5.25" floppies - all with an extra slot cut out on the other side of the pre-cut one - which made the C64 floppies double sided - saved me a fortune that did!

Indeed. They were selling cutters for that very purpose at the time.

Every once in a while you had a floppy which couldn't be formatted on the back side. But usually they worked well either way.

I did mine with my dad's hole cutter for leather belts, and before that a pair of scissors, which occasionally went very badly...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

DaddyHoggy wrote:

I still have both my floppy drives for my C64s - the original 1541 and an Evesham Micros Excellerator+ and several hundred 5.25" floppies - all with an extra slot cut out on the other side of the pre-cut one - which made the C64 floppies double sided - saved me a fortune that did!

Indeed. They were selling cutters for that very purpose at the time.

Every once in a while you had a floppy which couldn't be formatted on the back side. But usually they worked well either way.

I did mine with my dad's hole cutter for leather belts, and before that a pair of scissors, which occasionally went very badly...

Yes, scissors is what I used, too. Never saw a good reason to spend DM 5,- or whatever it was on that floppy disk cutter.