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Seeking Apricot Computer Owners and people good at recovering floppies

H

Haemogoblin

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 22, 2011
Messages
233
Location
Sheffield, England
Hi there guys

Earlier this week a began a thread on the forum looking for help restoring a copy of Wordstar 3.40 I picked up. This copy of Wordstar would appear to have been sold for the Apricot brand of computers.


I've had little success getting the floppies to work in my regular PC, because the disks would barely spin up. In fact it now looks like they have claimed the life of my USB floppy drive. However it's been suggested that even if I could get them to spin, I might actually not be able to read them on a regular PC, as Apricot computers used a different disk format.

Here is the link to the thread I started, which includes photo's
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?44057-Looking-for-Wordstar-3-40-for-DOS

The general consensus is that these disks need to be recovered and preserved as they seem pretty rare. Wordstar 3.40 seems to have only been released in Europe, skipping the States completely. As a hoarder of old computers, I kind of feel it's worth the endeavour, as to lose a piece of computing history would be a little sad. Maybe one of you already owns this copy of Wordstar and I dont need to worry :)

So if there are any Apricot users out there or anyone skilled at recovering floppies, please chime in :)
 
Hi James, I have a couple of early Apricots (an Xi HD & a portable), both of which run the non standard disk format. Apricot did make later PC's that used standard disk formats - but I don't have any of those!

I don't exactly use them much nowadays & I know that I will have to do some maintenance on the portable's floppy drive before I can use it, but the Xi should be good to go as I cleaned & lubricated it's floppy drive some months ago.

I only have a copy of starpolished wordstar, based I think on Wordstar 3.20 - and I'm not sure where I got that copy from as I don't have the original Wordstar disk(s).

What exactly did you have in mind for the Wordstar 3.40 floppies?
 
I know that rawread and rawrite can make images of apricot floppies, even though Windows itself can't read the disks. If you want to get inside the floppy itself you can slice the top seam with something like an xacto knife and while wearing fine white gloves remove the media to inspect it. Be careful not to let the metal spindle insert fall out or otherwise move. I had to do something similar when I had to replace my old Disk One for my FP but I wanted to keep the original floppy enclosure.

CGS_0480.jpg
 
Hi,

If the floppies have not deteriorated, you can simply make disk images off them using LibDisk, and transfer files from the images using cpmtools.
Have a look here: http://www.seasip.info/Unix/LibDsk/index.html
Also see the Apricot emulator, which works with these disk images straight away: http://www.seasip.info/Unix/QDAE/

Another way altogether is to upgrade your Apricot with a newer ROM, which makes it possible for the Apricot to use normal MSDOS formatted disks. Burning a new BIOS Eprom makes these machines a lot more usable! http://actapricot.org/support/apricot_eproms.html

Regards,

Oscar.
 
Hi guys

Thanks everyone for the replies!

I will give it ago with the software mentioned, I think the disks DO need removing from their current cases as the last time i tried to read them they would hardly speed and the result has been a dead usb floppy drive.

Well it's not dead, but it now struggles to read any floppy at all, reporting read write errors on good disks.

Going to try cleaning the head to see if it's picked up some rubbish.
 
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