Hello All,
(If you don't want to hear my nostalgic ramblings, feel free to skip to close to the end for what I am trying to do.) 😉
Loadstar is probably hands down my favorite reason for owning and using a C64 for as long as I did. I kept using my C64 well into the 90s, even as Amiga, PC and Mac became more my daily use systems. I subscribed to Loadstar for many years. I held on to a lot of my disks over the years but some accidentally went away when I sold off a chunk of my Commodore stuff. Thankfully, I had a lot of them in storage and retrieved them after 20 years in 2013. I have been using my original stuff pretty much since then. That is when I found the Loadstar Compleat and ordered a CD from Fender. It is fun to me to go through those old issues and the ones that I did not read back then. I loved reading the stories of the Loadstar Tower and all the great, tricks, programs, games, utilities and of course music files.
Thankfully the current images are good for the most part. I have run into a few with errors, non-working images and glitches from imaging to D64. D64 is fine for most things but since it is a lossy image format using it means that some data is not captured. This is mostly headers and more meta data as it would be called today but still it is not a preservation format or even close. Some issues of Loadstar contained disk sides that were commercial and some IIRC were copy protected. I can't state the issues that I remember but I know some of these softwares were not captured with Loadstar Compleat. Nor were the Best of and Sampler and subscriber special issues that had unique columns.
That and the fact that LS disks are not aging so great when it comes to physical floppy media, is why I started imaging all of my Loadstar disks. I have imaged about 500 disk sides so far. Keep in mind that many issues are 4 sides and there are a lot of special issues and collections sold at that time. I also have been given quite a few issues that I imaged, even if they were duplicates.
For simplicity I am using nibtools with a ZoomFloppy and a 1571 and 1541 with parallel port. I also have a Kryoflux with a 5.25" PC drive for very stubborn copy protections, which really is overkill for LS disks. .nib files capture the entire disk and while not a preservation format itself it does insure the disk image is good and captures all the bits that .D64 discards. I have an image station setup in my office that I have used to image 1000's of disks from Commodore, Amiga, IBM PC.
I have so many LS disks that i have had to remove the actual disk cookie from the vinyl jacket, wash by hand with detergent and put into new donor jackets just to get a good read. This is not a process for collectors as many times the disk is non-functional without doing this and is cut open and usually cannot be used again.
Project Goal
My goal is to re-image every issue of Loadstar, specials and distributed software so they will be perfect copies. They can easily be converted to .G64 or .D64 if needed, but anything other than .G64 is kind of pointless, IMHO. This is a huge project as it is next to impossible for one person to find all of the issues. I have another collection of 100 some odd disks that someone is sending, but I don't have high hopes as so many of these disks have gone bad. I have been doing this for the past few years, and would love to see it complete.
If you have Loadstar disks that you are wondering what to do with or you want to have them imaged please reach out to me. If you have the equipment, patience and time to image them it would be appreciated.
I would also love to hear your thoughts on this too. Thanks for sticking with me on this long rambling post.
(If you don't want to hear my nostalgic ramblings, feel free to skip to close to the end for what I am trying to do.) 😉
Loadstar is probably hands down my favorite reason for owning and using a C64 for as long as I did. I kept using my C64 well into the 90s, even as Amiga, PC and Mac became more my daily use systems. I subscribed to Loadstar for many years. I held on to a lot of my disks over the years but some accidentally went away when I sold off a chunk of my Commodore stuff. Thankfully, I had a lot of them in storage and retrieved them after 20 years in 2013. I have been using my original stuff pretty much since then. That is when I found the Loadstar Compleat and ordered a CD from Fender. It is fun to me to go through those old issues and the ones that I did not read back then. I loved reading the stories of the Loadstar Tower and all the great, tricks, programs, games, utilities and of course music files.
Thankfully the current images are good for the most part. I have run into a few with errors, non-working images and glitches from imaging to D64. D64 is fine for most things but since it is a lossy image format using it means that some data is not captured. This is mostly headers and more meta data as it would be called today but still it is not a preservation format or even close. Some issues of Loadstar contained disk sides that were commercial and some IIRC were copy protected. I can't state the issues that I remember but I know some of these softwares were not captured with Loadstar Compleat. Nor were the Best of and Sampler and subscriber special issues that had unique columns.
That and the fact that LS disks are not aging so great when it comes to physical floppy media, is why I started imaging all of my Loadstar disks. I have imaged about 500 disk sides so far. Keep in mind that many issues are 4 sides and there are a lot of special issues and collections sold at that time. I also have been given quite a few issues that I imaged, even if they were duplicates.
For simplicity I am using nibtools with a ZoomFloppy and a 1571 and 1541 with parallel port. I also have a Kryoflux with a 5.25" PC drive for very stubborn copy protections, which really is overkill for LS disks. .nib files capture the entire disk and while not a preservation format itself it does insure the disk image is good and captures all the bits that .D64 discards. I have an image station setup in my office that I have used to image 1000's of disks from Commodore, Amiga, IBM PC.
I have so many LS disks that i have had to remove the actual disk cookie from the vinyl jacket, wash by hand with detergent and put into new donor jackets just to get a good read. This is not a process for collectors as many times the disk is non-functional without doing this and is cut open and usually cannot be used again.
Project Goal
My goal is to re-image every issue of Loadstar, specials and distributed software so they will be perfect copies. They can easily be converted to .G64 or .D64 if needed, but anything other than .G64 is kind of pointless, IMHO. This is a huge project as it is next to impossible for one person to find all of the issues. I have another collection of 100 some odd disks that someone is sending, but I don't have high hopes as so many of these disks have gone bad. I have been doing this for the past few years, and would love to see it complete.
If you have Loadstar disks that you are wondering what to do with or you want to have them imaged please reach out to me. If you have the equipment, patience and time to image them it would be appreciated.
I would also love to hear your thoughts on this too. Thanks for sticking with me on this long rambling post.
