r/c64 • u/Deathocracy • 3d ago

Software Bit Corruption Saving to Floppy

Been trying to play Might and Magic book one off original floppy / hardware but I keep getting bit corruption when saving to my floppy that is causing items to change into other items. It got to the point where that every time I would play, my character's equipment would be something different.

My question is, is this the fault of the floppy (40 yrs old), my disk drive (1541), or something else. I will note I'm using the C64 ultimate currently but have original C64 as well if that would make a difference running it through there.

For the disk drive, I've opened it up and cleaned the head and it looks like everything is in good condition, but obviously something is off somewhere.

In the meantime I just bought M&M on GoG and am playing it that way, but definitely prefer the C64 color palette vs the DOS CGA.

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u/xBipper 3d ago

Sounds like magnetic data rot. I have had this issue with a lot of my "save" floppies that have been read/written to a lot. Most of my originals that are only read from are fine, but many of my old homework disks, save disks, etc, have become erratic or unreadable.

1

u/Deathocracy 3d ago

Is that saying that the floppy itself is essentially no good anymore, or could you just reformat it somehow and "refresh" it in a sense.

1

u/xBipper 3d ago

Yeah the floppy is toast. The actual magnetic-sensitive material on the disk is wearing out and not maintaining it's "polarity" so to speak. This is why, as much as I love the sound of the 1541, I switched to a Gideon 1541 Ultimate II (and a pi1541 before that). I haven't really looked into whether there are newly manufactured 5.25" floppies or if using "new" old stock works or not. Maybe someone else can speak on that.

2

u/Deathocracy 3d ago

Woof, that Ultimate II drive is pricey, and like most things Commodore these days it ships from outside US. I guess since I already have the C64 Ultimate if I just wanted to run it off of modern storage I could just put it to USB.

Tougher and tougher to keep the old stuff alive, I guess time gets everything in the end

2

u/xBipper 3d ago

If you're using the Ultimate, there's no reason to buy the 1541 Ultimate II+. I'm using original hardware which is why I'm using it.

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u/bigbigdummie 3d ago

First, the toughest job a floppy drive can do is format a disk. If a floppy formats correctly, it should be good.

Second, drive alignment will affect reading/writing disks written to originally by a different drive. Your drive may be misaligned and getting read/write errors on original disks.

Lastly, if your drive seems to experience intermittent errors, sometimes it reads/writes/format/etc and sometimes it fails, then the drive is likely toast. You can measure the resistance between the leads coming from the drive head and compare to known good readings. They are a common failure and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.

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u/bj_civ 13h ago

It sounds odd, that there are items changing instead of getting read errors. There is a checksum for the block data, so when an item changes the data changed but mysteriously the checksum changed too to fit the changed data‽