Quote:
Originally Posted by Catkins
I had two Microdrive units with my Spectrum. They were far more convienient than cassettes, until you invariably hit the dreaded "file not found", and you found you'd lost all your hard work.
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Uhh, tell me about it. About ten years ago I decided to un-store my Spectrum and its peripherals, including the Interface 1, Microdrive, and two 'proper' cartridge boxes filled with cartridges containing everything from classic games which I had modified to run from Microdrive, to 'Art' drawn with various art packages, to page after page of assembly language code, all of which must have taken thousands of hours of my life to create or otherwise transpose onto Microdrives.
When I tried them they were all, every single one, unreadable. It's well known that these suffer from the same 'pressure pad rot' which sometimes also afflicts cassette tapes, but in this case the pads were all OK and the tapes all seemed magnetically 'dead'. I was so put out that I threw all the cartridges away, and although I bought some replacements (with good pads) the loss of all that irreplaceable material killed any interest I might have had in revisiting the Spectrum at the time.
However, a fellow forum member has, just in the past week, brought my attention to this:
https://vdrivezx.com/vdrivezx/
It's a PCB which fits inside an original Microdrive housing and is, as far as the Interface 1 is concerned, an original Microdrive - but it 'records' to SD card - the card holder receives the card through the original front slot in the microdrive unit, very neat. I'll be getting one of these myself sometime in the next few weeks - I may post a 'review' in a separate thread.
There is a separate, similar version available for the QL.
As if mere unreliability wasn't bothersome enough, another great thing that the Spectrum / Microdrive combo would sometimes do was to crash just at the point where the Microdrive was recording something. If you were unlucky, it would erase the entire contents of the cartridge before you had time to realise what was happening.