Things I Found In the Basement

Still need some time away from writing new things, so here is an article I was going to post when I finished cleaning and reorganizing my workshop in the basement. Many of the objects described below will be happily donated to a good home if you ask nicely.

Adapted from a twitter thread…

I expected this to go badly, but it actually went pretty well. I used the FC5025 controller from deviceside.com with a 5.25″ drive I JUST RANDOMLY FOUND NEW-IN-BOX while cleaning out the basement hooked to an ancient macbook running Ubuntu 12.04. (The macbook is unreliable and out of date and i keep it around partly as smart terminal and partly for potentially-dangerous experiments I don’t want to risk a “real” computer on but which might be easier on an x86 than a raspberry pi)

Contrary to expectations, most of my PC 5.25 floppies read fine despite their long slumber. On average, I’d say I had fewer read errors on the 5.25″s than I did on the old 3.25s I was ripping via a cheap USB floppy around the same time. Is there some other device I can plug into a modern computer to read floppy disks? USB floppy drives seem to not quite be able to handle the range of disks that IDE ones could.

One annoyance with the FC5025 is that you have to tell it the format of the disk – it can’t guess for you. And if you tell it the wrong one, it seemed to need to be unplugged and re-plugged to reset it. I discovered that you can USUALLY BUT NOT ALWAYS tell the difference between a high density (1.2mb) and low density (360k) PC disk by the absence or presence of a plastic hub around the hole in the disk. This was a pretty reliable indicator, though I still made some mistakes…

Possibly the biggest surprise: The 5.25″ floppy version of SimLife came on one high density floppy and one low density floppy.

Ripping PC disks went incredibly well and I am VERY impressed by the FC5025. Ripping Commodore 64 disks, on the other hand, was wildly unsuccessful. Out of a couple dozen disks, only two ripped with no errors. Though I’m not sure how bad the errors were; hopefully they were unused sectors on the disks in most cases? A significant number of disks didn’t rip at all. Were they really cooked, or was it a variant format the FC5025 couldn’t handle? And were the disks even really bad or is it just a limitation of using incompatible hardware?

Flippy disks, of course, were a complete non-starter; most PC drives will flat-out refuse to read an upside-down disk. For the record: no, it does not help if you slice open the casing and reverse the media itself. I did find one commodore disk that had a second timing hole in the mirror position, so I might try that one some other time to see what the drive makes of it.

So why are the commodore disks so much worse to read? Is it that they’re 5-10 years older? Is the media less reliable? Is it just drive incompatibility and an actual 1541 might work? Or that the PC disks spent 20 years in my bedroom while the C64s lived in my wife’s attic?

Here’s some things I found:

• A program called “MHZ+”. Can’t track down anything on the net about what it does. I kinda have a feeling it was a TSR that promised to just magically make your computer faster. This sounds incredibly sketchy today, but at the time it was probably something innocent and useless like “It changes the memory caching settings”.
• QBasic source code to what might be the first game I ever wrote, a Star Trek game where you fought a space amoeba using the Enterprise crew as described in Roddenberry’s original pitch document.
• A dBase III file containing a uncatalogued of all the Doctor Who off-air VHS tapes I used to have.
• One paragraph of a Doctor Who fanfic. I have no idea where it was going.
• A backup of my Netscape bookmarks from 1997. Literally nothing on here still exists.
• The ancient games Phantasie and Phantasie III, but not Phantasie II.
• A 1 TB hard disk new in box. I have no idea why I have it. Based on where it was, I thought it was a cold spare for the NAS, but even the old broken NAS had 3TB drives.
• The Old Broken NAS. It’s a Patriot Javelin that was a fine starter NAS. Its flash memory started to go bad a few years ago. I assume you could rehabilitate it if you replaced the flash memory, but there’s nothing to be gained for me personally by doing that. Free to good home, I guess.
• Memory sticks. A lot of memory sticks. Remember Memory Stick? Sony’s attempt to do a format war against SD?
• How many of those little MicroSD-to-SD card adapters does a person need, anyway?
• I don’t need this many PC power cables, do I?
• A whole box full of broken fans. Case fans. Slot fans. USB fans. Desk fans. Whole box.
• The keys to my old office in grad school
• A skate key.
• A bunch of USB thumbdrives whose outer shell is a soft plastic that turned sticky and gross.
• Many XT-to-PS/2 adapters.
• A truly epic amount of cable. I’m talking like 20 pounds of coaxial cable. I’m talking just about every combination of serial cable. I’m talking KVM cables. I’m talking… Um… There’s this one cable which is a DE-9 serial connector at one end and a headphone plug at the other. What even is that?
• The Vadem Clio HPC that I won for coming in second in the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition.
• The keyboard off a Commodore Plus/4. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a whole Plus/4 (I am keeping this, so don’t ask).
• A complete set of Microsoft Developer Network CDs from 1996.
• A Zip-250 disk. I’ve never owned a Zip-250 drive. I have no idea what’s on it, where it came from, or how to read it.
• My Pentium II from college. A full tower case with five 5.25″ drive bays, a 3.25″ floppy bay, two internal hard drive bays, and eight expansion card slots. I’d had one bad experience with not having room to add on something I’d needed back in my 386 days, so I went overboard allocating room for expansion
• A 1989 Bill Wegman baseball card.
• A Cobalt Qube server appliance they were getting rid of at the real estate agency when I was a temp twenty years ago. Anybody want it? I upgraded the ram at some point, and it was, technically, the most expensive ram I’ve ever bought, since I was buying new-old-stock ram from the nineties in, like, 2008.
• Why do I have two food dehydrators?
• A Chumby. Neat little device. I hacked mine and wore out the flash memory, but I’d love to salvage the display and case if I can figure out a way to replace the brains with a raspberry pi. I just love the look of the Chumby One – very retro Space 1999 vibes.
• Some kind of headband with a knob on it and a rectangular plug with many pins. I have no idea what it is. Seems like possibly a part of a head-tracking system?
• A pile of Wyse Windows Thin Clients from a period when I thought it might make sense to put thin clients all over the house. That was dumb.