Vertigo disc retrieval

Now had the time to clean the discs (with Isopropyl alcohol) and remove mould/dust/grot; I’ve fed them through DDOS2ADFS (and fixed a few bugs :) ).

Disc fault

Just a note to say that discs that “look” clean still can’t be trusted, sometimes you’ve really got to get your eye in to spot dirt. You have to catch the light to see the matt vs shiny area to see mould. In the meantime, here’s a few more obvious ones:

Breakdown of casing?	Subtle dirt	Perfect example of a mould spot

Note sheen on disc case - needed reflection to highlight dirt.

Vertigo retrieval

Anyway, here’s the synopsis of the data retrieval so far, in rough order of age…:

Photo	Note on disc contents
	Roll-A-Ball New Master Disc (for BBC Master 128k); before we’d polished the game with advice from Superior Software.
	Roll-A-Ball Master backup - I usually kept two physical copies just in case. Floppy discs were a precious commodity when in school - spot the recycling!
	Sound and music development disc - urgh, couldn’t get this one to work. This had the white detritus as shown above - I think the sleeve has degraded.
	Vertigo - Game music, this was a late addition (we got the game working before making it a better package).
	Vertigo Master backup - probably the root copy that the later versions come from.
	Vertigo BBC’B’ disc version - alas, another faulty disc I can’t retrieve.
	BBC’B’ cassette version - can’t recall difference between the disc & cassette versions for the BBC ‘B’ - possibly the disc one loads the levels in on demand.
	Vertigo disc protection - stops simple piracy, also 40 track reader for 80 track drive.
	Vertigo loading code - eye candy!
	Vertigo tape compactor - forgotten we had this, must have tried to make it less painful for cassette users.
	Vertigo tape loader - using the compacted files.
	Vertigo+Pipemania compressed loader - so the two games would fit on a single 100kb 40T disc.
	Vertigo - electron - tweaked version of BBC’B’ variant.

Synopsis

Well, not bad to be honest - I think I’ve got what I need to get the sources back for all versions. Due to the lack of version control, there’s a lot of duplication - the BBC’B’ disc will contain mostly the same contents as the BBC’B’ cassette version, rather than conditional assembly.

Only real “casualty” is the “Sound and music development” disc - seems that white floppy discs don’t stand the test of time. That had various experiments with music & sfx on it. Ironically, other cheap, unbranded discs are fine - and have survived better than the Scotch 3M discs.

Next mission: start sifting and uploading to GitHub! I’ll start with the Master 128k disc, upload that and get it working with beebasm so it can be rebuilt off-beeb. Then onto the other discs - and finally to “diff” what I tweaked. . .