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#retrocomputing

365 posts284 participants10 posts today

So my 11 year old is sitting with the back of an envelope and a pencil, converting decimal numbers to binary.

They failed math last year in school. But they want to make a Gameboy Color game so they decided to learn Assembly... I just have to help them keep focused and they'll learn it.

But the most important thing that they need to learn is that grades don't define how smart they are. And for me the important thing to learn is to chill out and just let them wiggle and go on tangents

Replied in thread

@vga256 I dug out the source code and put a small HTML wrapper around it to explain it.

This version of the code is the last version, dating back to October 1988. It includes buffering blocks in RAM to avoid the performance problem with writing each 128 byte block to disk, and two different ways to cheat and abort a perfectly good transfer to avoid getting charged.

38 years later I'm proud of the cleverness, but not proud of the cheating. ;-)

brutman.com/leech/leech.html

www.brutman.comLEECH.BAS

After running through a stack of 250 donated 5.25“ inch floppies, here‘s my breakdown:

27 original disks, most still having the original content on them and reading okay!

30 good 1.2Meg HD disks
22 good SSDD 180K disks
103 good DSDD 360K disks

But also roughly 70 disks thrown away for being not readable at all or defective sectors.

I definitely have a good complement of disks on hand now :)