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Your Amiga games are likely dying

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  • Your Amiga games are likely dying

    The Amiga 500 came out just over 30 years ago, seeing as many as 6000 games released across its lifespan and that of its two immediate successors, the Amiga 600 and Amiga 1200. But if you were to dig out your old Amiga from the loft and try to load up Cannon Fodder, Pinball Fantasies, Zool or any other of the machine's classic titles, there's a very good chance they won't work.
    Bar a few late CD releases for the Amiga 1200, almost all Amiga games came on 3.5-inch floppy disks - a notoriously unreliable medium. Inside the hard plastic case is a floppy, round, plastic disc with a magnetic coating. The binary game code is stored on this disc in the form of opposite magnetic polarities - one polarity for 1 and the other for 0. The trouble with storing data using magnetic polarities, though, is that it's very easy to de-magnetise the disk. If you ever left your floppies too close to a strong magnetic source, like an old CRT monitor, you'll no doubt be familiar with the problem.
    Even without exposure to a magnet, the data on floppy disks will de-magnetise over time - a phenomenon called 'bit rot'. The truth is that no one knows for sure how long floppy disks can actually last. "They don't have a shelf-life, as such," says James Newman of the National Videogame Arcade (NVA) in Nottingham. "There are so many variables, from the quality of the original media through to how often they were used and how they've subsequently been stored. Variations of temperature and humidity can affect the adhesives that glue the magnetic particles to the disk itself, and you can get oxidisation - there's a lot that can go wrong! The simple truth is that these media weren't designed with the kind of longevity we're now expecting in mind - certainly it wasn't anticipated that they'd need to last 30 years or more..."
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