Uploaded February 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago

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In what is an experiment in content creation, your host NCommander has tried livestreaming and then making a video out of said live stream in an effort to see how viable it is to make videos on topics that I won't normally make a long-form video about. In this series that I'm tentatively calling NCommander in Reatime, I breakout the 5.25" disk drives, the SuperCard Pro, a DOS emulator, and then an unexpected detour into showing my Commodore 128 running CP/M and doing some testing on real hardware.

What makes this preservation project so unique is that this is my first time dumping CP/M disks, and also trying some recovery techniques on a disk that is literally falling apart. CP/M, for those unfamiliar is an 8-bit operating system that cloned by Microsoft to DOS. Commodore experimented in making CP/M available for the C64 and C128, with the 128 version being somewhere between "bad" and "mediocre".

For those who aren't familiar with it, WordStar is a famous text editor that uses special key shortcuts (the so called WordStar) that many users swear by and still use to this day, and something that needs to be better documented and preserved in history. Most of these disks have been dumped before, but I'm not sure they exist in magnetic flux form.

Beyond that, I've been working on learning DaVinci Resolve and really take my videos up to the next level, as well as been thinking real hard on the possibility of either starting up a Patron or YouTube Memberships for the channel. I've got to do some more research into the topic, but I'm at least going to float the idea to the community.

NCommander's Socials:
Twitter: twitter.com/FOSSfirefighter​
Discord: discord.gg/V8esNah​
Blog: https://casadevall.pro/​

DEFCON 201 of New Jersey:
Twitter: twitter.com/defcon201nj
Homepage: defcon201.org

Interesting Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:10 - Equipment and Setup
01:58 - WordStar 2000 Preservation
04:07 - Wordstar 3.0 for CP/M
05:02 - Attempting Data Recovery
07:32 - WordStar Release 4 for CP/M
09:04 - VICE and the Commodore 128
10:22 - The REAL Commodore 128
13:02 - Closing

Music licensed from Epidemic Sound with the following tracks used in order:
- Forever to Run - Howard Harper-Barnes
- Mainlander - Dream Cave
- Sustained Hope - Martin Gauffin
- For the Many - Jon Bjork
- A Celtic Blessing - Bonnie Grace
- Run with Your Heart - Dream Cave
- Puzzle Of Complexity - Jo Wandrini