Back when CD-Rs were the thing, there were CD burner drives which would etch images in the unoccupied areas of a CD-R. These so-called LightScribe drives were a novelty of which most users soon tired, but they’re what’s brought to our mind by [dbalsom]’s project. It’s called PNG2disk, and it does the same job as LightScribe, but for floppies. There’s one snag though; the images are encoded in magnetic flux and thus invisible to the naked eye. Instead, they can be enjoyed through a disk copying program that shows a sector map.
The linked GitHub repository has an example, and goes in depth through the various options it supports, and how to view images in several disk analysis programs. This program creates fully readable disks, and can even leave space for a filesystem. We have to admit to being curious as to whether such an image could be made physically visible using for example ferrofluid, but we’d be the first t admit to not being magnetic flux experts.
PNG2disk is part of the Fluxfox project, a library for working with floppy disk images. Meanwhile LightScribe my have gone the way of the dodo, but if you have one you could try making your own supercaps.
Thanks for covering my silly little utility.
A similar project was covered on Hackaday a few years ago, but only did black and white images:
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/19/writing-pretty-flux-patterns-to-old-floppy-disks/
The major improvement in this version is support for grayscale images. I was surprised how well that ended up working.
I’ve been doing this already to my Apple II bootsector demos, i.e. http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/lovebyte_2021/
I wonder if I should go back and do this for my IBM PC bootsector demos now
That takes me back…boot tracing apple 2 games for…backup purposes.
Custom boot loaders, that replaced ‘start next step of boot’ with run monitor. Repeat.
I recall finding 8 additional layers of dungeon on a disk, just waiting to be undeleted.
All you had to do was get through the boot process.
Years later:
Employer was in some legal trouble. (Didn’t matter that money was back in trust by close of business. They weren’t supposed to take it Vegas, for even a minute. Winning bet didn’t make it ‘all good’, except it did. I digress.)
Assistant attorney general gave me a file to print (on floppy).
So of course I bitcopied the floppy and undeleted interesting things on the CA state shysters ‘scratch’ disk.
Including details of employers shenanigans.
They gained great respect in my eyes that day.
Mild mannered CFO Paul F had balls of stone.
Good times.
Sadly, nothing on that disk made me rich.
Undelete is still useful.
Will last as long as FAT.
LightScribe wrote images to the label side of the disc with the laser, not to the data side as the article implies.
But wasn’t there something that wrote images to the data side. I seem to rememer that.
DiscT@2 and LabelTag both worked on the data side.
Right, LightScribe would only write on the label side of the disk. There was however also DiscT@2 which could write image patterns on the unused space of the data side.