8" floppy system needed to recover old game data

You can't do much about the width of a track, because head size is a physical constant of the drive. In principle current hardware could put flux transitions farther apart or some such, but I don't know whether the existing controller electronics can. It should be - but is it? I don't know floppy controller chips enough to say. However, if you pick up any good book on coding theory you can read all about adding ECC bits and then scattering data around so that (say) any arbitrary ten sectors could be lost or corrupted without rendering any data unrecoverable. ("Lost" is an easier case; it's easier to correct bits you know you don't have than bits you have but which you might have wrong.) For example, if you take (say) 13 sectors of 256 bytes each and think of them as an array of 13 by 2048 bits, you can then apply ECC along the 13-bit dimension, adding 5 error-correction bits, to get 18 sectors of 256 bytes each, with the ability to correct any N sectors that are wrong, for some value of N (which I'm not a good enough coding theorist to know, but I'd guess is around 4 to 6). Repeat for each track and you've lost 5/18 of your space but you've got the ability to lose up to N sectors per track without losing any data. More complex schemes can spread data out even more.... /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B