Greasy Weazles and dodgy disks

Ahhh, I’m still not having much luck, I’m afraid. I’ve still not got many of these games to work. It’s not the fault of my Greaseweazle, more my fault for neglecting my Amiga disks as a teenager and beyond.

I thought I’d had luck getting my version of “Aquatic Games” to work, seeing as it’s one of the best Amiga games in my humble opinion. It converted almost perfectly, but sadly, track 72 had one single bad sector.

It booted, and I hoped it was going to work, but as soon as WinUAE reaches that track, it just freezes to a black screen. Bah. I do have one last trick up my sleeve. I’m sure I mentioned that I was going to buy a floppy disk cleaner? Well, it’s arrived!

You simply slap the disk into there, and the metal cover locks against a little hook, and you can then have access to the disk surface. The disk pictured is the first one I tried, aaaaand I had no luck at all. This wasn’t to do with the cleaning. The magnetic disk had came away from the metal spindle… The conditions these were stored in were so bad, the adhesive had dried out. So that’s one disk that’s never getting recovered.

I tried “New Zealand Story” next, and this was also a depressing sight.

I didn’t get an image of the disk before the cleaning, but that still looks completely knackered. The red ring going around the image above coincides with a scratch on the disc surface, so I’m surmising this has absolutely no chance either. Shame. I loved that game.

I tried another random disk. Remember in my first post, I posted the image of the disk with its surface lifted? Well, this was one of its 2 brother disks. I’m guessing that as they were kept together, it’d be in a similar state to the first one. A good candidate to see if it could be cleaned….

Yep, still not good. Still unusable, and still pretty noisy when converting. At least it didn’t instantly crumble into a pile of black dust like its fallen brother. I’m not even going to look at the third one, they’re both just going in the bin. A shame, as they’re KAO branded disks. I had quite a few of these when I was a kid. Always reliable.

I think the best test for this, is to locate one of the disks that was “OK”, but appeared to have a cluster of bad blocks in a certain area. That would suggest there’s dirt on the disk. It’ll be interesting to see if I can get it working 100%.

In other related news, I’ve been on ebay, and have picked up “Arcade Pool” for the Amiga. I think, out of every game I owned, this was the one I spent the most time on. I still have it somewhere, and the last time I tried it back in 2006, it still worked. The disk was pretty messed up though. One of the corners had been snapped off, and the metal cover was missing, so even if it was to turn up I wouldn’t fancy my chances in actually getting it imaged.

At the time of typing, it’s not arrived, as I only ordered it a few hours ago. I’d expect it to arrive here within the next week.

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MercuryVapour

I'm a man of few words. Any questions?

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