Recently Kevin Edwards got hold of some 3″ disks containing source code to various old commercial games. He imaged them with the Kryoflux flux-level imager (Greaseweazle and FluxEngine are also good options). These tools produce highly accurate images of magnetic media that rips through copy protection and format concerns even allowing you to write the image back to disk with that in tact. This level of detail emits large files — 11.7MB for a single-sided Spectrum disk that normally holds 173KB is quite typical. 4KB data tracks happily turn into 215KB flux.

Powerful as these tools are they don’t give you access to the files contained within that disk although some can write emulator-compatible images like DSK. As somewhat versed in 3″ media and DSK files through my archive experience and my open source Disk Image Manager tool he asked if I could take a look into achieving that.

I’ve always been fascinated by floppy disks from the crazy stories of Steve Wozniak designing the Disk II controller using a handful of logic chips and carefully-timed software to the amazing tricks to create — and break — copy protection recently popularised by 4am.

I’m going to be writing a few articles about data preservation and copy protection but first we need a short primer.