I still have a lot of old 5.25 inch floppy disks and some of them contain texts I would like to recover. They have originally been written on an InterTec Superbrain Z80 Computer with single sided drives and a capacity of 170kB each.
The easiest part of transferring the past to the present is to get yaze running under openSUSE 11.1. This is a CP/M 2.2 emulator. But how can I get the contents of those old floppies? I even doubt that the Superbrain would still run when powered up after 30 years. Any ideas?
>
> Hi all,
>
> I still have a lot of old 5.25 inch floppy disks and some of them
> contain texts I would like to recover. They have originally been written
> on an InterTec ‘Superbrain’
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertec_Superbrain) Z80 Computer with
> single sided drives and a capacity of 170kB each.
>
> The easiest part of transferring the past to the present is to get yaze
> running under openSUSE 11.1. This is a CP/M 2.2 emulator. But how can I
> get the contents of those old floppies? I even doubt that the Superbrain
> would still run when powered up after 30 years. Any ideas?
IF (big if anymore) your “modern” computer even has a 3.5 inch much less
5.25 drives, you should be pretty much home free. I keep an old 486 box
with 5.25 and 8 inch floppy drives for such things. You can usually find
an old DOS program to translate CPM or Radio Shack formats once you get the
hardware in place. Best I recall from the last time I got into it, all the
current 5.25 drives I have laying about will handle anything for single
side, single density up to double sided double density media. The only ones
that I can’t handle to date are some of the variable density things
written by an old Victor machine…
If my memory is correct, it had RS232C ports. That may be the way out.
Yes, your memory is correct. I used those to connect it to a telephone modem (accoustic coupler) at the time. The other one was connected to a printer.
There used to be a shareware or nagware DOS program that could read many different CP/M format floppies, but it required a real floppy drive because it reprogramed the controller to handle the different formats. Unfortunately I can’t remember the name of the program, but I think it came from the SIMTEL PC software collection. Maybe google can help find the descendant of that archive now.
IF (big if anymore) your “modern” computer even has a 3.5 inch much less 5.25 drives, you should be pretty much home free. I keep an old 486 box with 5.25 and 8 inch floppy drives for such things. You can usually find an old DOS program to translate CPM or Radio Shack formats once you get the hardware in place. Best I recall from the last time I got into it, all the current 5.25 drives I have laying about will handle anything for single side, single density up to double sided double density media. The only ones that I can’t handle to date are some of the variable density things written by an old Victor machine…
Google will locate the programs you need.
Good idea. Can I take this a little bit further? Would it be possible to connect a 5.25 inch floppy the the floppy cable normally used for a 3.5 inch floppy on a more recent big tower and then access that with the CP/M 2.2 emulator? Or do I need a machine running DOS? What I want to read are single sided single density floppies.
Yes, you can connect 3.5" and 5.25" floppies on the same cable, only there are two types of connectors on the cable and drive, an older edge connector and a more recent socket style connector. Some cables had both types of connectors when both types of drives were in use.
I really think your best chance is with a DOS machine running that CP/M floppy reading software I mentioned. I remember salvaging several CP/M floppies from an obscure Fujitsu CP/M computer using that program. Ah here we are, the program is called 22disk:
vodoo wrote:
> I still have a lot of old 5.25 inch floppy disks
there are folks providing services such as transferring Super8 films,
AC/DC Albums, 78 RPM records of Bing Crosby (etc) and 35mm slides of
the '50/'60s onto DVDs…
i’d bet there are also folks who will do the same for most any
size/format floppy (or mainframe tape) you can find…but, i’ve not
googled…
Yes, you can connect 3.5" and 5.25" floppies on the same cable, only there are two types of connectors on the cable and drive, an older edge connector and a more recent socket style connector. Some cables had both types of connectors when both types of drives were in use.
I really think your best chance is with a DOS machine running that CP/M floppy reading software I mentioned. I remember salvaging several CP/M floppies from an obscure Fujitsu CP/M computer using that program. Ah here we are, the program is called 22disk:
Digital Research - CPM FAQ
Sydex does no longer support 22disk. They took it off the net. However I could use ImageDisk which needs dos. Next step will probably be to get one of the old boxes running. There seems to be no linux app capable of reading old CP/M floppies.
Just google for it and you will find a copy somewhere. You really need a program that reprograms the PC floppy controller to handle the various CP/M floppy formats, which had all varieties sector and track layouts, and 22disk does that. That’s one thing the IBM PC brought, standardisation of the floppy format due to a common hardware architecture. CP/M did not mandate the hardware architecture.