Date   : Fri, 11 May 2012 12:28:50 -0500
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Torch discs.

On 05/11/2012 10:57 AM, Jim Hearne wrote:
> I'll need to work out what i can read them with since i've not got a working
> BBC setup at the moment.
> If i remember correctly, only older PC's can read BBC discs if i hooked the
> BBC drive up to a pc ?

It very much depends; in rough terms I've found that there's a 'bad zone' 
of several years where PCs of that era tend not to handle FM-density media 
at all - but then toward the end of the floppy era things actually seemed 
to get better again.

Overall, it's not *too* difficult to find a PC that will read FM - writing 
is often a different story, but for the purposes of seeing what's on the 
disks that's not an issue.

Imagedisk comes with a 'testfdc' util which will see what a machine's 
capable of if you have a known-blank/sacrificial floppy handy, but it runs 
under MSDOS so you really need either a second floppy drive (3.5" or 5.25") 
to boot from or a bootable copy of MSDOS on hard disk; I'm sure others on 
the list can comment on alternatives which run on other OSes.

I'd say hook the drive up and see how it goes...

cheers

Jules