23 May
2006
23 May
'06
11:55 p.m.
On 5/24/2006 at 1:12 AM staylor at mrynet.com wrote:
Suffice it that I may disappoint if called upon for any
of those one-shot
proprietary media formats :-D
Shall we instead see what practical potential for discount arises?
Good luck, Scott! I think that there's probably not too much of a market
for common soft-sectored formats. At least that's been my experience.
It's a lot of fun figuring out those "one shot" formats--and there are more
of them than you'd think.
Sometimes, even the "common" ones like 240K Brother 3.5" diskettes, the
encoding can be pretty challenging (used on a lot of Brother WP equipment).
It took poking around in a Brother ROM to figure that one out.
Even when you manage to figure out how to retrieve the raw data, figuring
out how things are allocated and stored (if not one of the common operating
systems) can get to be pretty interesting. One format that I kept coming
back to for almost 10 years was the DECMate WPS I format. Bits and pieces
were no problem, but how to put the whole thing together didn't happen
until I found a source listing of the WPS software and worked my way
throught it.
The funny thing is that after I worked out all of the nuances and wrote a
WPS I-to-HTML converter, the customer decided that he didn't need the
information after all.
Such is life.
My current project is some Harris Lanier/AES 32-hard-sector 8" floppies
that have spent the last 30 years in a closet. I hope they're ASCII-like.
Cheers,
Chuck