Zork Zero, MS-DOS retail release (Infocom, 1989)
Disc-specific material for archiving the dual-media MS-DOS retail box: two 720K 3.5” diskettes and three 5.25” diskettes. The catalog’s first floppy entry. No disc content lives in this folder - only identification records, listings, notes.
Contents
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
zork-zero-1989-dos.ls.txt |
File listings of the 3.5” diskettes |
notes.md |
Per-release findings, including the media-targeted graphics renditions |
checksums.txt |
Reference hashes for raw images of the 3.5” diskettes |
Archiving your own copy
USB 3.5” floppy drives mount on modern macOS, but dd against the device fails: unlike optical drives, the floppy’s device node stays root-owned.
hdiutil reads it through a privileged helper instead:
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN
hdiutil create -srcdevice /dev/diskN -format UDRO disk1.dmg
hdiutil convert disk1.dmg -format UDTO -o disk1 # produces disk1.cdr
mv disk1.cdr disk1.img # raw 737,280-byte image
Compare against checksums.txt.
The 5.25” diskettes need flux-level hardware (a Greaseweazle or similar). Capture flux first - it is the archival artifact, and it makes decode mistakes recoverable without re-reading the disk - then decode:
gw read --format=ibm.360 --raw diskN.scp
gw convert --format=ibm.360 diskN.scp diskN.img
Both flags matter on the read: --format makes the read verify each track as it goes (with retries on marginal reads), and --raw keeps the stored flux genuine.
With --format alone, gw read writes flux re-synthesized from the decoded sectors - clean-looking, but stripped of the weak bits, gaps and timing detail that flux capture exists to preserve.
These are 360K double-sided diskettes; a decode at the wrong format betrays itself immediately (a 184,320-byte image whose FAT media byte still reads 0xFD).