I've been going through multiple boxes of old disks I have accumulated from people over the past several years. It can be tedious, but it can also be really interesting to find weird old software.
All of the stuff I've been going through yesterday and today has been on 5.25" floppies, and all of it is from 1984 to 1987 so far. There are some sets of disks that seem to have not aged well and they make terrible noises as soon as I start to lock the lever on the drive. I would say that less than 20% of the disks that are noisy work at all. And maybe 5-10% are completely readable (usually requires removing the disk, running a cleaner through the drive, blowing into the disk to move debris around, etc.... but it does work). The disks that don't make lots of noise have so far been about 85% readable I would estimate. I've been quite surprised. There have been a fair amount that were so noisy though that I didn't even bother fully latching the drive and just pulled them out.
I have one mystery for the old timers here though:
I've found tons of disks containing assorted software, probably downloaded from a BBS or something. I have already gone through probably 90% of this stuff over the years, but I'm down to the last 10% and I have stumbled upon some strange disks. There are multiple sets marked "Arc 1" , "Arc 2" etc. , which I presume are simply general "archives" of downloaded software and files, since the files aren't exclusively in .arc format. The puzzling thing is that one set of 20 disks is marked separately "Arc 1 - 720K Disk", "Arc 2 - 720K Disk", etc. and all are marked as 720K. Yet, when I read them everything single last one of that set of 20 works perfectly fine and is formatted as a standard 360K disk. I have read every file off of all 20 disks in this set with no errors, and not a single one was 720K.
Just in case any turned out to be 720K, I read that it's possible to sort of trick a PC into allowing 720K 5.25" formats by changing the BIOS setting for the drive to 3.5" 720K. I did this, and surprisingly, this doesn't seem to hurt anything and allows me to read the disks totally normally... but they are still only 360K with ~350K of data on them. I also found discussion of a TSR that allows a PC to easily format 720K 5.25" disks, so it's possible that someone could have done this years ago, but I see no sign of that being done on these. I ran the TSR in DOS mode on my PC and it made no difference in how these disks are being read whether I have the drive set to 720K or 1.2MB in the BIOS. I would assume that if my drive was just not reading the disk format properly they would not work, or I would get errors. It seems odd that it would somehow only see 360K of data and be able to pull it off of every disk without errors.
Anyone have any idea why these disks would be marked this way aside from simply being a mistake? Seems like a very strange mistake. I guess it's also possible that they were reformatted as 360K later, or possibly batch formatted to 360K by some archiving software (insert next disk... format... compress file... copy to disk... insert next disk... format...), but it seems odd to me that someone would have left this set of 20 separated, carefully stored in a ziplock bag and left mislabeled as to capacity.
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.