I hope you all like light pens because that's all I'm posting for the next few days
I successfully made an adapter for the IBM PC light pen to work on the Tandy 1000.
Since the Warp Speed light pen just has a 4p4c connector on the end (what normies call RJ11) we can easily adapt that to all sorts of things.
I didn't have any 4p4c jacks, but what I do have in abundance are 8p8c keystone jacks.
I hooked the light pen up to the scope to see how well the new pen worked. And honestly, it impresses! It's much more responsive and far less noisy that the cheap pen.
I'm not about to stick this priceless driver floppy into my sketchy ass tandy drives that haven't been cleaned or re-greased and make sounds kind of like cyborg goats high on jimson weed, first thing I need to do is back it up and make a copy with the ol' greaseweazle.
The bad news is that those divots on the mylar do indeed corrupt the disk, but the good news that they're just corrupting empty, formatted tracks.
The slight misalignment of tracks and the red lines (indicating discontinuities in valid MFM, or "write splices") tell a little story.
Professional disk mastering equipment lays down an entire track at once, and they typically are high precision and well calibrated devices, so this sort of sloppiness indicates that this disk was just formatted and written to on someone's PC.
This is common enough - sometimes software just doesn't get published in volumes that warrant taking out a contract with a disk duplicator.
Just imagine the guy who's job it was to duplicate these all day long and put the labels on and stick them in the sleeves.
he was LIVING THE LIFE
gloriouscow
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️