Needed to look through some 5 1/4" floppy disks, so installed my newly acquired drive in an old Socket 7 system with an AMD K6-2 300MHz, running Windows 98 SE.
The disks haven't been stored well at all and as a result many have bad sectors, some unreadable and 1 or 2 that died soon after inserting them. I did manage to backup quite a bit of software, though not many games in this particular collection.
Backed up:
-
Psion Link (Disk 1 of 2, seems to be Serial communication software.)
- Fantavision (Animation software from late 80s.)
- LocoScript (Disks 1-3 of 4) - not sure what version, disks copyrighted at 1990.
- Secretary Bird (Word Processor, Spreadsheet & Database software from late 80s.)
- Graphic Editor (no idea where this comes from, filename is GEDIT.EXE and it's a cursor based black/white block drawing program)
- NewsMaster (DTP from Unison World, 1986)
- Pafec PC DOGS (Amazingly, all 14 disks of this 2D CAD software backed up fine. These must have been stored properly.)
- Some GEM Apps (BASIC2, Paint, Doodle & KWord)
- A couple of Kuma Clip Art Disks.
- Leaper (Yay a game - Frogger clone, quite fun.)
A few disks that I checked, including stuff like GEM/3 Desktop & Timeworks Publisher are defective but pretty easy to source replacement disk images online, so I'm not worried about those. I was pretty gutted about my original copy of Borland Reflex Version 1 having a defective disk though.
All in all it was fascinating checking some of this old software out. 🤣