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Comment by mrwh | Hacker News Reader

I'm returning to my childhood home in a couple of days after many years away, and now I'm wondering about searching the attic for my A1200, and whether any of the games I wrote for myself way back when, in Amos and then Amiga E, are still recoverable. Probably not; if the disks exist they're almost thirty years old, and probably best kept running in some corner of my memory. I'll try though.

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Please recap your old hardware before powering it on, and use a newly made power supply - way too much stuff gets fried when people neglect these things. Also if your Amiga has a working RTC, that's powered by a battery that will often leak and ruin your motherboard. So you'd need to replace that as well.

IIRC Amiga 1200 PSUs are not so bad, it's the C64 and oldest Amiga 500 PSUs which stink. A1200 does not have RTC in standard configuration. (Amiga 4000 and 3000 have.)

A standard ATX (or AT) power supply can be used with an Amiga 1200, so that's an easy route if you have one. Cut off the cables (Amiga PSU donates connector), some electrical tape, and a paper clip to jumpstart the ATX PSU, and Bob's your uncle.

> I'm returning to my childhood home in a couple of days after many years away, and now I'm wondering about searching the attic for my A1200

By an incredible stroke of bad luck the first Covid lockdown (the one that lasted months) happened when I was far from my wife and kid. By chance I was in my childhood home (alone).

Out of boredom I started watching YouTube videos about fixing and maintaining old computers. It motivated to go the attic and garage and find all my old computers. Took the battery out of an old Mac. Greased my Commodore 128's 1570 drive. Booted the C128 and checked which floppies were still working.

And quite some still worked: it was a complete and total blast from the past to see the game Commando, with its incredible soundtrack, booting!

I don't know if the A1200 is prone to leaking capacitors or not: if it is send it to someone who can recap for you.

It was really fun to get these old machines back to life: I really encourage you to do it.

In February 2019 I decided to try retrieving some information from some 5.25" floppy disks for the Apple 2c we had since the 80s. They had some of the first bits of programming I had done amongst other things (school work etc). Using ADTPro I think I only encountered 1 disk which I couldn't transfer - I've got 19 of them. I was then able to get information off them quite easily. So you may have more success than you think.

I notice now the internal drive of said 2c isn't working and won't boot anything (I could get ADTPro onto a spare floppy without booting anything). I did use it to do the transfer in 2019. I can boot from an external drive with some patching from the monitor program. I suspect the drive either needs heads cleaning or some realignment, but I haven't had more time to try.

Sadly I no longer have my A1200 (or A600). I have a few disks from it still.

Probably not; if the disks exist they're almost thirty years old, and probably best kept running in some corner of my memory.

I came across an old box of 3.5 discs a few years back that I had stored away since the early 90's. I recovered them using ddrescue to create images using a cheap USB floppy drive.. was great fun.

true time capsules

Excellent, there's hope then!

Absolutely, barring any environmental issues (moisture or heat), they will probably image just fine. But please note that Amiga formatted disks won’t be possible to read in a standard PC floppy drive. You’ll either need to use an Amiga with some kind of transfer software, or custom hardware for disk imaging.

Edit: I just noticed that they are discussing this very thing a little further down the thread, with lots of concrete options.

I have heaps of mid and late 80s floppies (5.25" and 3.5" DD), and almost all of them work just fine. Until the late 90s, floppies were incredibly sturdy and reliable. Late 2000s HD floppies are crap, OTOH.

I can totally still read my 35+ years old Workbench disks, which have been booted from hundreds of times. It's amazing, really.

That said, I've created images of the important diskettes from my youth, so I still have them even when the media eventually fail.

Anecdotally, I've had better luck reading Amiga and ST floppies from the 80s and 90s than floppies from the 2000s. I'm guessing disk quality took a nosedive somewhere around 2000..?

Good luck!

You may want to get some kind of removable media for your Amiga, many people use a compact flash card as a hard drive, then use an IDE to CF adapter [1] to attach it to an A600/A1200/A4000. You can format the CF card as a standard Amiga hard drive, then you can remove it and read the Amiga drive on a more modern computer with unadf [2] and you can convert your AMOS source code to readable text with listamos [3]

[1] e.g. https://www.amiga-shop.net/en/Amiga-Hardware/Amiga-classic-h... but I'm not endorsing this specific shop or its products

[2] https://github.com/lclevy/ADFlib

[3] https://github.com/kyz/amostools

Similar here. Got an A500 and am emigrating, so I need to sell or keep or do something with it. Will test the disks so I know what I have.

I think the Amstrad CPC-464 I had, had even more core memories. But this thing was a beast in its day.

I've been on a spree of this, so far most of the disks have worked!

I recently did this and found pretty much everything still worked. The creator of AMOS is still around at https://www.aoz.studio and their Discord will help you with any AMOS issues!

Do try. I'm certain the Amiga community would love to see it.

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