Did anyone have a look if there's something on the disk from the collectors box?

You can also use those to play stuff in DOSBox on your phone. :slight_smile:

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:exploding_head:

And of course, a model m keyboard along with it:

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Absolutely!

What a wonderful way to create a DOS PC with an even smaller screen! :joy:

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Instantly better ppi without any remakes :wink:

… or should that be bpi (blocks per inch) … :thinking:

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Quoting Ron Gilbert in https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/tool_names :
“… all the bytes were XOR’d with 0x69 …”

so I converted chuck.txt to binary and tried to XOR it with different values

  • I found on the net a xor utility which takes a number between 1 and 254 as key

  • i ran it in loop through every key over binary chuck file
    for i in (seq -f “%03g” 1 255) ; do echo $i; ./xor -k $i -i binarychuck -o chuck$i ; done

  • I used “file” command to check if any of the results is of a known format.

here is the result, but it doesnt lead to anything, it looks like false positives. The so-called COM executables do not do anything in dosbox for example.

$ file chuck* | grep -v “: data”
chuck027: COM executable for DOS
chuck047: DOS executable (COM, 0x8C-variant)
chuck052: PGP\011Secret Sub-key -
chuck054: PGP\011Secret Key -
chuck072: SYMMETRY i386 executable (invalid @ 0) version 391330116
chuck083: SysEx File - PPG

no luck, let’s try something else

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Now to go further, we would need chuck files from other disks to see if they are different
Also of interest could be a raw dump of one of the disks, done with dd unix tool, or any equivalent tool in windows (eg WinImage)

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Unfortunately it seems that the most of us has the “Version 1” floppy, without the “chuck.txt” file, because we had the first box of the game.
The solution is to purchase (again!) Thimbleweed Park, just to get another copy of the floppy…

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I don’t think that each floppy has its own content. That would be a huge effort during the production.

I can hear @RonGilbert laughing while we are searching the meaning of some random numbers…

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Ron-Gilbert-Laughing

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That would depend on the floppy production process. How many boxes with disk got sold ?
I wonder if big industrial floppy replicators are still in production ?
I remember in the late 90s, using a small unit at work. It would hold about 50 disks and run through them overnight. We used it to generate license keys for a product. A BAT script would run individually on each disk.

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Yes, but why should they do this? Most of us don’t have a floppy drive. So only very few players will be able to read the disks. And then only a small amount of them will investigate the “text”. As nobody of the developers mentioned/pointed to this file, I would assume that they haven’t made each disk content unique.

5EpVIEl

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Don’t underestimate collectors. Many even have a C64, Amiga etc…
I myself have several floppy drives, but I rarely use them, to be honest. Due to its age, floppy disks are not reliable anymore. Thankfully, there are drive emulators to be used on old computers nowadays.
Also nowadays, it is considered good customer service to provide a download of the software you purchased, just in case you can’t read your own media anymore.
Most notably, Factor 5 still does this: FACTOR 5

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Same here, including several C64, Amiga, etc. But I’ve put them into boxes due to the lack of free space. I know a lot of other collectors who did/do the same. And they won’t dig the old drives out only for a PC game. :wink: Most of them have switched to emulators and thus virtual floppy disks.

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I technically have a floppy drive as well as a motherboard it can attach to but I’d have to put it all together first.

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original amiga or C64 drives won’t read HD disks (ie 1.44MB), which I suppose thimbleweed disk is ?

Later Amiga models came with HD drives, but those are not wide spread, as the PC took over the mainstream market at that time already.
Unlike PC drives, which had doubled the transfer rate for HD, Amiga HD drives spin half that fast in HD mode, so the existing controllers could be used. Reading FAT formatted HD disks should be no problem on those, but I never had one of those drives to try.

DD disks on the Atari ST too AFAIK.