Software-based floppy disc data separator

Kieron Wilkinson wrote: Hi Kieron, Sorry for the delayed post. I wanted to give it my full attention, and am just getting that type of time now. First, let me say that I'm glad that SPS has a voice. I'm really not sure. I emailed a few times, basically explaining who I was, what I was doing, if I could help or get involved with SPS, etc. I checked my sent mail going back and couldn't find it. There were some early on messages circa 2005, and then some later ones in 2006. I accept your apology. Well, I sort of sprouted up around 2005. :) Have you seen http://www.techtravels.org/amiga/amigablog ? I'm glad to see there are a bunch of projects too. I've answered quite a few emails and comments from my blog. Some as recent as two days ago. I don't see why not. :) I don't want to digress here unnecessarily. And my viewpoint might not be popular. There's a large portion of the software that is abandonware, companies are defunct, IP isn't owned by anyone. Where there is an IP owner, they are not likely to be aware of, care, or spend time/energy/money trying to enforce those rights. Copyright laws in the US (and in many other countries) suck. I'm glad to see that this stuff is being preserved, but I guess one has to ask to what end? If it's not available for people to look, see, touch, use, then exactly who is benefiting from your work? It's great that you have a huge catalog of preserved software, I'm just missing WHY. Is this for future generations? When? When copyrights expire? How do you think the mission statement of SPS(in terms of providing access to the preserved material) compares to a regular museum? I'm not trying to give you a hard time, I'm trying to understand why what you are doing matters. How does this benefit the community? Can I be blunt? Big deal. Here you sit on thousands of perfect copies of games, and the people who enable your collection to grow get their copy "verified." Great. So you have a big fat catalog, and everyone else (contributor or not) gets what? Access to the library? No. And I'm glad this is the case. And if you have a "secret" distribution arm that you can't admit to in public, that's fine with me. I'm glad that SOMEONE is making the effort to make this stuff available. I will also say that I think it's a damn shame if there has been successful research done on recovery algorithms and the results haven't been made public. While I acknowledge this is my choice, I've spent thousands and thousands of hours researching, documenting, and making available (immediately) different techniques for reading, analyzing, and working with floppy disks. I doubt any of my posts will win a Nobel peace prize, but my goal has been to share my efforts so that it can "fast track" the next guy trying to do something similar. A lot of what we are talking about has a limited lifetime. Once the media goes past its useful life, and drives start to be come rarer and rarer, and those who knew of the Amiga die off --- much of what we are talking about simply won't matter any more. Or at least not even on a hobby scale. We need access to this knowledge, now, while it's still important. Keith