New Hampshire Atari Computer Club

[+Allan]

I recently picked up some disks from the user group from New Hampshire but all but one disk seems to be unrecoverable. The disks bonded with the sleeve. The one disk I could recover seems to be a different brand. See attachment below. Hopefully somebody from this group comes forward one day which is partially why I am putting the post up.

 

The user group is mentioned in a number of publications below. The disk image attached does not have any original programs on it. They are all 'borrowed' from magazines. My guess the rest of the disks are the same. The only unique thing about the disk is the DOS (DOS 2.0) is modified with the club name and disk number.

 

https://archive.org/details/Official_Atari_Computer_Users_Groups_1982-12-01/page/n5/mode/2up?q="New+Hampshire+Atari+computer+club"

 

https://archive.org/details/reportofreceipts831984nash/page/256/mode/2up?q="New+Hampshire+Atari+computer+club"

 

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-05/page/n485/mode/2up?q="New+Hampshire+Atari+computer+club"

NACC_10.atr

[+Allan]

I cut out one of the stuck disks and after wiping the section that was stuck with alcohol, put it in another disk jacket and copied the disk.

NACC_2.atr

[Atari_Ace]

FYI, NACC_2.atr has lots of problems.  Sector 472 was probably bad (it's empty in the image), and in sectors 30, 184, 380, 409, 419, 460, 499 and 509 the metadata appears to be incorrect.  I've edited the metadata to make the files complete, but the files GOLDRUSH, SABOTAG, CONNECT4, DEFENSE, CHICKEN are damaged as a result.  PINGPONG is also damaged.  Only BLOCKADE, CONCEN, MULTIPLY, and OPART appear to have escaped damage and are valid BASIC programs.

 

I suspect the files are common BASIC programs we can find in other collections and thus repair the damage, but I've only made minimal changes to the disk for the moment.  I'll try to fix the disk more thoroughly later this week.

NACC_2_fix1.atr

[+DjayBee]

9 minutes ago, Atari_Ace said:

I suspect the files are common BASIC programs we can find in other collections and thus repair the damage

I am still hoping for some blessed programmer to step up and do a "universal database of Atari artefacts".

 

Everybody could then throw his/her collection at it and afterwards a search for byte sequences, sectors etc. would yield a list of matches.

The database would certainly grow massively but based on the average size of our artefacts, a modern PC should still be able to handle it.

[+Allan]

20 hours ago, Atari_Ace said:

FYI, NACC_2.atr has lots of problems.  Sector 472 was probably bad (it's empty in the image), and in sectors 30, 184, 380, 409, 419, 460, 499 and 509 the metadata appears to be incorrect.  I've edited the metadata to make the files complete, but the files GOLDRUSH, SABOTAG, CONNECT4, DEFENSE, CHICKEN are damaged as a result.  PINGPONG is also damaged.  Only BLOCKADE, CONCEN, MULTIPLY, and OPART appear to have escaped damage and are valid BASIC programs.

 

I suspect the files are common BASIC programs we can find in other collections and thus repair the damage, but I've only made minimal changes to the disk for the moment.  I'll try to fix the disk more thoroughly later this week.

NACC_2_fix1.atr 130.02 kB · 1 download

Yea, so far everything is from Antic, Analog, Compute, Softside, etc.

[Atari_Ace]

7 hours ago, Allan said:

Yea, so far everything is from Antic, Analog, Compute, Softside, etc.

I haven't found a good match for CONNECT4 so I'm not sure of its origin, but the others I've found in other collections (or at least similar enough to be related).  I've repaired about half of the broken programs and continue to work on fixing the remainder.

 

Given SoftSide was published out of New Hampshire, I wonder if any of the Atari authors from that publication were associated with this user group?  Prolific contributors to SoftSide of Atari content included David Bohlke, Alan J. Zett, and David Plotkin.

[+Allan]

The CONNECT4 seems familiar but I can't remember. It most likely is in some of the other public domain disk collections.

[Atari_Ace]

I fixed up the disk as best I could.  DEFENSE and CONNECT4 have some lines I couldn't restore, so I REM'd them out for now.  Hopefully the disk is at least a closer representation of what it was originally.

NACC_2_fix2.atr

[+Allan]

Here is another one. This one is a real mess.

NACC_9.atr

[Atari_Ace]

4 hours ago, Allan said:

Here is another one. This one is a real mess.

Yes, every track has multiple damaged sectors, making this one quite a puzzle to put back together.  The directory appears damaged, hiding two files on the disk (BOWLING and AMODEM42), so I've readded those entries.  I've also stitched the broken links back together so that the files can be extracted, but I believe every one of them is broken to some degree due to missing/damaged sectors.  It will probably take quite some time to put it back together, but I'll take a crack at it eventually.

NACC_9_fix1.atr

[+Allan]

Here is disk #7. It's so bad it crashes the browser program ATR Image Explorer. I can read the directory in DOS 2.5 in an emulator so I guess that is something. One more disk after this one.

 

NACC_7.atr

[+Allan]

And here is the last one.

NACC_1.atr

[Atari_Ace]

Here are disks 1 and 7 with the links fixed up so the filesystem is at least consistent.  Every file is damaged however, so don't consider these fixed in any significant way yet.  As with disk 9, it's going to take a lot of work to restore these disks.

NACC_1_fix1.atr NACC_7_fix1.atr