• Software Preservation at London Show

    From London Show@21:1/5 to All on Sun Oct 24 17:53:16 2021
    Software Preservation @ RISC OS London Show
    ===========================================

    Saturday 30th October 2021, 11am - 5pm
    St Giles Hotel, Feltham, TW14 9AD

    https://www.riscoslondonshow.co.uk/


    At next weekend's show, thanks to Paul Emerton's generous offer of his
    time and expertise, we will be offering a software preservation service.
    Here are a few more details of what we will be doing.

    Basically bring along your old BBC Micro or Archimedes floppy discs, and
    if we don't have it in the Acorn Preservation Team archive, we'll take a
    copy and give it back to you while-u-wait. We particularly want to
    preserve old commercial software that is being lost to bit rot.

    To achieve this, Paul will be bringing along his Greaseweazle. No this is
    not a slippery pet(!), but a device for reading and storing the raw
    magnetic flux from floppy discs, thus preserving their contents exactly.

    This means the original disc format (DFS,ADFS,DOS) does not matter, and
    even any weird special copy protection formats can be read and are
    preserved (not cracked). These are considered the "Master" images.

    These master flux images can then be used to generate images in other
    formats that are suitable for use with emulators, or even for writing back
    to physical floppies.

    More info on Greaseweazle here - https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle

    Please bring your own USB stick or SD card if you want to take away a copy
    of the disc images. Note these images can be large, upto 85MB each!

    Even if you can't bring your discs along, Paul can give advice on how best
    to store them to reduce degradation and avoid damage to drives, helping to preserve both data and equipment.

    Come and see Paul at the Preservation stand!


    --
    RISC OS User Group Of London - https://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/
    RISC OS London Show - https://www.riscoslondonshow.co.uk/


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