USB floppy drive

[Elle]

I'd like to replay some of my old LucasArts games that I have on floppy disks and I'm considering the purchase of a USB floppy drive for that purpose. But I'm just wondering if it's worth it considering that old disks such as these might be long dead. For example, I have disks for Monkey Island 2 that my dad bought when it came out, in December 1991 it seems, and the glue underneath the labels is clearly showing.

 

Of course, it's not that big of a risk since these drives are cheap, around $30 apparently. But my finances are utter crap so I thought I'd ask what you guys think before making a fool of myself.

 

Thanks! 🤩

[knolll]

As long as they were stored in relatively stable environment, e.g. not too hot/cold or humid, they should still be readable.

[Elle]

To my knowledge, I think so. They were stored inside a closed library shelf for many, many years. Thank you for the feedback, I appreciate it. 💾🙂

[Lagomorph01]

Funny, I've thought of that myself for a couple of times, but I have most my game files backed up on discs or hard drives by now.

I get the nostalgic value, but isn't it easier just getting the games from GOG (or a similar service) and playing them from there? (Saves you on swapping discs too!)

If you really want to play them as they were released, it might be better investing in an old pc setup (486 or something). A friend of mine still has one standing around too.

[Scummbuddy]

But swapping disks and hearing them be read was a joy of the era!

[s-island]

Several of the disks can be found in the collections on Web Archive as image files that you can mount in DOSBox.

[Remi]

1 hour ago, Scummbuddy said:

But swapping disks and hearing them be read was a joy of the era!

 

The WinUAE and FS-UAE Amiga emulators come with faux disk-sounds. ;

[Elle]

Well, I wasn't planning on playing the games from the actual floppies. My plan is to copy the disks to my local hard drive or, if required, run the DOS installers in DOSBox to get a working copy of each game that I can run with ScummVM.

 

I guess it's a sentimental thing; I wanted to play the same versions my dad had used himself.

[Elle]

Okay, so it turns out one of my colleagues had a USB floppy drive at the office. I didn't know he was cool like that! I brought my stack of floppies and we created images of them. To my amazement, they all worked except disk 5 of Atlantis and the Roland upgrade disk for Loom but I was able to find images of them on archive.org

 

So then I brought the images back home, mounted them in DOSBox-X and installed the games in the same way awesome people used to do. It was really fun to see the original installers and hear the PC speaker beeps when asked to insert the next floppy disk. And finally, I copied the installation folders on my Linux machine and added them to ScummVM. Here are a few screenshots I managed to snag between two sips of Chardonnay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 6, 2022 by Elle
Re-added the images since they were moved to a new host.

[Lagomorph01]

Thanks for the screenshots. Your story warmed an old man’s heart.

Edited August 25, 2021 by Lagomorph01
Spelling 😬

[Elle]

You're welcome, I'm glad it did! This whole project was done out of love, really. Love for my father, who I miss more than I could ever express, and love for how technology used to be. Gosh, I'm so nostalgic these days.

Edited August 26, 2021 by Elle