Imaged 2026-03-11·CRC OK·1,457,664 bytes
Disk 07 of 12 · Halcyon Micro, Bristol, 1991–1996
Read the label,
then the disk.
Twelve 3.5-inch disks survived the liquidation of a small British games studio. We imaged every sector, transcribed every hand-written label, and published the contents exactly as the archivist found them. Pick a filename off the label to open it.
README.TXT
A plain-text welcome written by whoever cut the master disk, dated three weeks before the studio closed its doors.
The file opens with a directory listing that no longer matches the disk — two entries were deleted and overwritten sometime in 1995, which is how we know the disk stayed in circulation after the company stopped existing. The remaining prose is characteristically dry.
“If the loader beeps twice, the drive head is dirty. Clean it. Do not send the disk back to us; there is nobody left here to receive it.”
We have preserved the original line endings, the trailing form feed, and the two typographic errors in paragraph four. Nothing has been corrected.
| Sector | Contents | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 01–02 | Boot record | Intact |
| 03–08 | FAT copy 1 | Intact |
| 09–14 | FAT copy 2 | 2 bad bytes, repaired |
| 15–29 | Root directory | Intact |
ATLAS.EXE
An unreleased isometric map editor, compiled 14 September 1994 and never shipped to a single customer.
ATLAS draws a 64×64 tile grid at 320×200 in thirteen colours and lets you paint elevation with the number keys. It is startlingly fast for a program of its age, and it crashes reliably the moment you try to save to drive B.
Our emulation notes recommend 8 MHz, no expanded memory, and a mouse driver loaded before launch. The internal build string reads ATLAS 0.91b — not for release, which we have taken at its word for thirty-two years and are now ignoring.
“Nine tenths of a good tool is knowing which tenth to leave out.” — hand-annotated on the disk sleeve
MEMO_94.DOC
Eleven kilobytes of internal memo in a word processor format nobody supports, recovered by hand.
The file uses a proprietary container with an eight-byte header and run-length compressed paragraphs. We wrote a small parser; roughly 84% of the text came back clean, and the rest is recorded below as gaps rather than guesses.
| Pass | Method | Yield |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Header walk | 41% |
| 2 | RLE expansion | 77% |
| 3 | Manual repair | 84% |
Two names have been withheld at the request of surviving family. Everything else stands.
SPRITES.DAT
742 kilobytes of packed 16×16 cels — the single largest file on the disk and the reason it was formatted at high density.
The palette is unusual: thirteen entries instead of the customary sixteen, with three slots reserved for a cycling water effect that appears in no surviving build. Someone drew a lot of water for a game that never got wet.
Each cel carries a four-byte hotspot and a one-byte flag we still cannot explain. Suggestions from anyone who worked on the toolchain are extremely welcome.
BOOTLOG.SYS
A two-kilobyte trace left behind by the last machine that ever read this disk in anger.
The final entry is stamped 22:14 on 3 November 1994 and records a failed write to drive A. The disk was ejected and, as far as we can tell, never inserted again until it arrived at our lab in a shoebox thirty-one years later.
22:14:07 WRITE FAULT A: RETRY? N
22:14:11 VOLUME PARKED