Copy That Floppy!

Been a hot minute since I posted here. Spent some of my time since the release of the Brok DLC exploring various dated tech projects.

As an example, on top of a relatively new Mac Studio are two floppy drives. The 5.25“ drive I’ve had for a good while thanks to my desire to archive some Emulator I floppies back in the day, so the smaller 3.5“ drive is the relatively new addition. The process also saw me try an open source to Kryoflux called a Greaseweazle, pictured on top.

By now you’re probably wondering, what need did I have for these, and was it related to music? To answer both questions: a month ago I was lucky enough to have snagged an ultra rare collection of floppy disks containing new presets for the famous E-mu Proteus 1 synthesizer of the early 90s. Each of these disks were formatted for early Macs and PCs with SysEx messages of the new presets and some additional programs to make the MIDI transfer simpler.

Two of the dumps turned out to be iffy. One case was due to being unfamiliar with early Macintosh floppies, which were formatted at an unusual 800k instead of the traditional 720k double density floppy disks. The other disk turned out to have corrupting track.

Fortunately, not all was lost with that other disk. On the contrary, it turned the missing data was arranged identically to the other PC-formatted disks, so a simple byte copying and then rewriting to the disk fixed the problem, even if it’s technically no longer a verbatim 90s disk.

The underlying data has been uploaded to the Internet Archive for the time being. In the meantime, I’m grateful I was able to recover these rare synth presets for others to use in time before the disks deteriorated from bitrot completely!