If there were to be a floppy disk equivalent of "It was a dark and stormy night", it would probably be "I ordered a game from Suruga-ya, and one of the disks turned out to have issues." Unlike most stories of this kind, the one I'm about to tell you has actual mystery elements to it. The game in question was an (AFAICT) undumped X68000 port of the 18+ dungeon crawler Magic Knight (1992), purchased a couple years ago. Upon inspecting Disk B, I failed to spot anything out of the ordinary, and dumping it seemingly went without a hitch. That was when, to my horror, I was greeted with this: The first instinct of a preservationist, upon witnessing such carnage, is to think there must've been dirt or damage you missed. However, I couldn't find a trace of either. Is this the fabled phenomenon known as demagnetization? The localized nature of the problem, limited to the "left" side, was extremely curious too -- almost like a "calling card" left there by a cocky serial perpetrator. Will Jack the Ripper (of magnetic substrates) kill again? Over the months (and years) that followed, I tried dumping this disk on a fair number of drives (some reserved for manual microstepping, to get reads around possible scratches). While I got variations in the pattern based on the drive used, there was nothing big enough to point me to a solution. I was completely stumped.

At the same time as I was experimenting with the disk, I was naturally looking for a replacement in the auctions. The rarity of this particular port already meant I was in for a long wait, but then it dawned on me there was another problem to contend with: the disk labels being identical across platforms. 💧 What this means in practice is, when I eventually get lucky, and find a set of just the disks, there's no way of being sure they're for X68000, as opposed to the (somewhat less egregiously rare, and already dumped) PC-98 version. Naturally I may have to fight a Japanese collector to win an item like this, and every time it's going to be a gamble. Well, would you have known it, that's exactly what ended up happening. After a year and half of looking, I spotted the first set of disks. As expected, the (re)seller probably had little idea which system they were for. And of course, I got contested at the very last minute. But thanks to the version being a mystery, my opponent gave up pretty quickly, and I only had to sweat the final hurdles: Will this be the right version, and will the disks be fine this time around?

Inspecting Disk A, I only noticed a few light mold spots that were easy to clean. Then it came time to dump it...aand my heart dropped: Unexpected read issues in several places. 🙀 The problem spots look very different this time, kinda like mold spots along the header of Sector 005 -- just without the mold, as subsequent cleaning efforts proved fruitless. Why so much weirdness with this one game? Could it be cursed? (More realistically, maybe it uses a particularly bad brand of disks.) At any rate, no need to panic Krug, you have this disk already in the bag. Time to move on to Disk B...

Ohh myy goddd: Some crazy weird stuff going on at the exact place where I didn't want to see it. Whatever it is, it's impervious to cleaning. Guess I'll just risk a read attempt... Well I'll be damned, sometimes things just work out lol. For good effect, Disk C from the new batch also had major issues, but I had that one too already secured. So I don't really even know what to say. It pays to be good AND lucky.🕺 But wait, aren't you forgetting something? What about the version?

I warned you about versions, bro... Sweet, sweet Human.sys, come to papa. 🤗 That's the good stuff right there. Data matches with my original dump, so we actually did it, and got there in the end.

And thus, the world of gaming was (again) made a tiny bit richer. Medetashi medetashi. Didn't even break a sweat.

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