Oh! So I talked to the owner of a computer shop near my work, and you often come up. He mentioned the "floppy cleaner diskette" you had. He said that 20ish years ago, they used to take blank floppies, and just write a program on them that would move the head back and forth a lot to "exercise" the drive, and slapped a "disk cleaner" sticker on the front. He also mentioned that it was pretty much snake oil, and they'd give them away with purchases for peace of mind. I think it was some sort of sector-by-sector disk checker or something.
So snake oil with extra steps. Duh, I don't even know why are people trying so hard to find a purpose for the teac :D Obvious BS, don't act like fraudsters haven't existed since the beginning of time...
It’s a placebo disk to sell to people that “need a disk cleaner” old computer shop I worked at had several gimmicks people requested. They would complain real disk cleaners “didn’t do anything”
Reminds me of how some modern software shows loading bars just to make the user think it is doing something because no one will believe it finished in less than one second.
UFOs? Bermuda Triangle? Big Foot? No, we’re talking real mysteries here, like a Japanese floppy cleaner from the 90s that looks exactly like a normal floppy.
I had a similar disc a long long time ago, but the disc was split into two sections, half the program the second part was dry head cleaner. I have a feeling your disc is a pirate of this disc, I will try find my boxes of discs to see if I can find it and photograph it for you.
So I downloaded the floppy image and opened the hex editor to browse through the files for any clues. What I found was: - The graphics are in MAKIchan Graphics format, and the meta-data in the header shows that two different computers were used to make the graphics: "98SA" (I assume a PC98) and "MPS" (no idea) - The Metadata for these MAKIchan files just says "C-lab. Floppy Disk Drive Head Cleaner" and nothing else. - It was compiled using Borland TurboPascal for Windows Version 7.0 - Some long searching reveals that this file is one component of the sound driver (specifically for the PC-98): github.com/mistydemeo/pmdmini/blob/master/src/pmdwin/ppsdrv.h -- note one of the comments referring to 1994 as an example date, so it's era appropriate - There is a long string of 16-bit characters at the top of one of the files (OPNDRV.COM offset 608). Assuming it IS UTF-16 then it spits out Chinese characters rather than Japanese. - There is not a SINGLE reference to TEAC *anywhere* in any of the files. So with the meta-data not containing any reference to TEAC, a lack of any copyright information except for the NaoNeko sound driver v0.1, the random insertion of Chinese text into the audio driver and then the physical label on the floppy disk itself looking really poorly made for a company like TEAC makes me think it's a fake disk, in the sense of it being sold by a shady company using the TEAC branding rather than TEAC themselves pushing it out there as snake oil for use in stores. If someone wants to try and better translate the HEX for the text data into a more legible form, here's the dump of it. I got most of the Chinese characters out of it, but either I don't have the full character set installed or it's not actually UTF-16 and it just happens to line up. Either way, it's REALLY strange that it's just... there. The NaoNeko sound driver is Japanese so you'd think it'd show Japanese characters but, nope. 6A028F02 B602DF02 0B033903 6A039E03 D5031004 4E048F04 E80E120E 480D890C D50B2B0B 8A0AF309 6409DD08 5E08E607 74070907 A4064406 EA059505 4505F904 B2046F04 2F04F303 BA038403 52032203 F502CB02 A3027D02 59023702 1702F901 DD01C201 A9019101 7B016501 51013E01 2D011C01 0C01FD00 EF00E100 D400C900 BD00B300 A9009F00 96008E00 86007E00 77007100 6A006400 5F005900 54005000 4B004700 43003F00 3C003800 35003200 2F002D00 2A002800 26002300 21002000 1E001C00 1B001900 18001600 15001400 13001200 11001000 200AFB09 220A2A0A 360A3E0A 430A480A 510A5A0A 630AC10A E20AF40A FA0A250B 200A200A 200A520B 6C0B760B 810B8C0B 970BA20B AA0BC40B D60BEC0B 050C0000
@@marcusaureliusf I've tried several encodings and I can't get any of them to display anything legible (and encodings like Shift-JIS just throws up a bunch of errors). Plus, some characters seem to start with with values too high for some standards of Japanese text encoding. UTF-16 is the best I can find. What we really need is someone with a PC98; character set might not be so backwards compatible as I first thought.
I don't think the data at the top of OPENDRV is actual text (for PC98/DOS/Win 3.1 it would absolutely not be Unicode, Unicode is too new). But the bottom of OPENDRV contains some error messages in Shift-JIS ＦＭ音源ドライバー Ver. 0.1 (c) 1994 naoneko. all rights reserved. $ＦＭ音源ドライバーは常駐していません。 $ＦＭ音源ドライバーを解放しました。 $ＦＭ音源ボードが見つかりません。 $ＦＭ音源ドライバーがすでに常駐しています。
"the teac music" is a movement from the classical era song called "The Four Seasons" by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi; Concerto No. 1 in E major, "La primavera" (Spring).
@@Psythik Yes, I know. It's also The TEAC Music. Just like Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 "Eroica" 2nd Movement is also "The Civilization 2 Gandhi Just Nuked Somebody Music".
@@LGRBlerbs To do that you'd need some sort of device that holds the disk in place and has an attachment that lets you turn it. I don't think there is any such contraption.
I originally thought it was a "prank" disk. Back in the late 80s, I had a disk you could run that would display a false C prompt on the screen. When any command was entered, it would display an error message (possibly a virus warning) and say that the floppy drive needed to be 'cleaned.' It would then play the sound of running water and move the drive head back and forth as if it were an agitator then finish with a "spin" cycle.
Even found a video of it, but sadly the sound is played much too fast, on my machine the whole process lasted about 20-30s (Commodore PC-10, a XT-Clone). ruclips.net/video/5FhCyftAcbU/видео.html I'm also pretty sure this is how I caught my first computer virus, 170x, AFAIR
My thoughts on the Teac is that by simply accessing the disk - the physical motion of the drive heads moving repeatedly - is what they consider "cleaning" it. The heads are now cleaner because they.. moved a lot. It's all I got.
I feel kind of bad sending that TEAC disk now and sending you down that rabbit hole haha I really just assumed it was was placebo and didn't do any cleaning. Unlike your new cleaning disk
I was thinking the same thing. I can't imagine a counterfeit or rippoff product would go to the trouble of including software for something this simple plus the whole thing gives off a WinBlows95 vibe.
DoubleSpace. Now there was a damn insufferable thing to support when people I had to support were determined to use it. The concept of total loss of data didn't appear to bother them.
Weren't there some drivers or something that would sit between the OS and the physical disks/RAM and force an on-the-fly compression/decompression of data to increase space at the cost of performance?
@@tiagotiagot yes, some sys driver and because it was rather big, 40k or so, people tried using memory optimizers like Qemm and such making it even more fragile to use hardrive compression 😄
Thank you. I had hoped someone would do that.That would rule out it being a bootleg of some sort of hybrid disk, as such a disk would need to do some sort of seek on the disk.
That's it exactly if you ask me. Same thing goes on in that part of the world today, but with phone knockoffs, where it has 12 cameras but only 1 real camera inside. and a fingerprint scanner that just knows when the screen is touched, you can unlock it with your dic.. I mean nose.
Yeah it's just a scam. They've bought standard floppies cheap and then sold them with the software/label claiming to be a cleaning disk for a lot more.
Opened some files in a hex editor.. It looks like the ".MAG" files are MAKI02 format images. You can open them with this web viewer: recoil.sourceforge.net/web.html
Could it have been for magneto-optic drives that TEAC made and were quite popular in Japan? There's a patent for using the magnetic surface to focus the optical part for cleaning. patents.justia.com/patent/6973011
I'm not dismissing the possibility that it could be fake, but i also think it's quite likely that it was originally part of a set, consisting of a data disk and an actual cleaning disk.
Does the files in the disk use the whole 1.44 MB? Does the label looks like it has been factory printed? If the answer to both questions is no there's a good chance that someone just copied the contents of an actual cleaning floppy (that contains data + cleaning) and just put them in a blank disk with a fake label and made a quick buck. And if that's the case, it means that there's a real disk somewhere and eventually someone will send you and we will have another Blerbs video. Yay!
My guess is that's not actually made by TEAC. They don't seem like the type of company to put their name on something like that. Probably something someone made to sell cheaper than the real thing.
Kinda what I was thinking, there was tons of crazy crap coming out in the 80s and 90s for PCs and everyone wanted a piece of the action, I think the idea behind the program was to read through all the sectors of a floppy, rattle the heads around and maybe that would "knock off" some dust who knows.
Okay, what's the next crazy theory we can come up with on how this disk theoretically works so Clint has to try it again to satiate his curiosity while amusing us?
My theory is that it is rapidly moving the head back and forth kind of like those “floppy disk music” videos do to produce sound. Perhaps if the head is vibrated at the right frequency it knocks the dust off.
@@PhilGlockner That's the only thing that makes any sort of sense to me at this point. I can get the logic behind the theory but I just can't see it working at all.
It arranges a set of bits in memory to form a symbolic invocation of the ancient Hittite god of clean floppy disk drives, then directs electronic prayers at it. Alternatively, it sets up a CPU instruction that resonates at the exact frequency of the great galactic blancmange, which extends itself 5th-dimensionally into the floppy disk drive and abducts all the dirt particles for its own nefarious purposes.
Maybe it pairs with a TEAC drive that has internal cleaning pads. And running the executable parks and unparks the head to these special areas or something. Maybe the access pattern of the head makes it shed some dirt. Fast wiggling. Who knows.
Hey Clint,as for the TEAC Disk, I was wondering if they might have a file with a changing byte pattern on it. This "might" magnetize/demagnetize the heads the same way as you can do with a screwdriver. Of course a floppy will always read different bytes and therefore it shouldn't get stuck on one polarization, but who knows? You could open up the files in a hex editor to see the pattern or even look for api calls in the exe... or just leave it like it is 😁 great video as always!
I suppose the TEAC one is a placebo disk of sorts, but the act of having the data spread across the disk will no doubt force the head to move along the rails, and read different parts of the disk. Perhaps its to help keep the drive in good working order by doing this. Very odd! [Edit: seems others have also come to the same conclusion. Snake Oil under the guise of keeping the drive working at its best and giving it excercise :D ]
Okay so i JUST REMEBERED that while looking at some obscure media stuff a couple years back I found a twitter thread just FULL of animations for these types of things, but like including VHS, DVD, even game consoles like the SEGA CD and Saturn! I know youtube doesnt like it when people put links in the comments so it was posted by MaxKriegerVG on May 1st 2019. If you use twitter's advance search it should pop right up
Possibly the Teac came with some kind of alcohol-based paste that you must spread on the disk surface before inserting into the drive (or maybe there's something inside the disk, I'd love to see a teardown).
The Teac one looks like a bootleg to me I think someone just bought a box of blank disks, made some animations, printed off labels, and sold them to unsuspecting shoppers
Cleaner disks would make sense on Mavicas, because disassembling them enough to get to the heads with a cotton swab is much more difficult than with a regular desktop drive. Still haven't cleaned mine (which I got years ago, prompted by LGR and 8BG reviewing them) but it does work flawlessly for now...
I remember using the dry type pretty often back in the day. It worked like the disk in this video. The OS never recognized it. I was pretty shocked when I started getting CD-ROMs that were cleaners that were recognized by the system. It was pretty surreal back then.
Maybe the floppy head cleaner is not a cleaner for the floppy, but the cleaner for your *head*? Like you look at the animation, you listen the music, relax and get your head clean.
Hey, maybe in disk inside have something clever. You can try spin around it in slide open, maybe have something adapt the film itself. Final can do, tear it appart.
I dunno. I liked the loud slamming down of the disk at the beginning of the video. Probably unintentional, but it's like starting the video off by saying "Look at this stupid crap!"
You should've tried using a dual-floppy machine, you should've put one disk in drive A and it would clean drive B. Works even better with quad floppy drive setup! You just put Teac disk in drive A, dry cleaner in drive B, wet cleaner in drive C and a piece of paper in drive D. And all you drives will be cleaned! Also if you have CD-ROM attached, it will be cleaned as well, both inside and outside.
At this point I think we can conclude the thing is just a fancy scam. If a data-only disc _could_ do something to "clean" a head, at most it would be some sort of degaussing where it commands the head to write alternating 1s and 0s over and over to demagnetize parts, but that would imply the head is made of some form of ferrous metal that can be magnetized to begin with, in which case it would just outright not work as a magnetic reader....
My guess, is the first disk you received was more of a 'motor exercise' program than a head cleaner, judging from the everything different about a cloth disk... I could only imagine a few sample sizes this might be useful for (back then), people who only made smaller files that didn't reach the latter sectors of a disk, or ever rarely... It just sounded like it was moving the head to max and min on the rail. I'm only 5 mins in on the video, but I'm hoping my comment isn't out of turn, lol edit: did you _really_ have to try to access an unformattabe disk? 🤣
I'm pretty sure what's happening with the TEAC floppy is this: 1. TEAC used to manufacture floppy disk drives 2. Lots of people probably ran floppy disk cleaners in them 3. Since these cleaners physically touch the read/write head, lots of people must have damaged their TEAC drives using these cleaners 4. They then sent them in to TEAC under warranty TEAC must have decided that the best course of action is to give these people a disk cleaner that was officially supported on their drives, and would not actually damage the drives, as many of the "real" cleaners did. Keep in mind that these head cleaners were mostly a pretty bad idea. In 99% of cases, floppy drives ran just fine without any cleaning, and inserting something that physically interfered with the read/write head was much more likely to damage things, rather than help with anything. So this was most likely TEAC's way of trying to prevent their customers from damaging their drives, and then sending them in under warranty.
Did TEAC ever produce floppy drives of their own? My thought is perhaps the TEAC disk contained some sort of data or signal that activated a proprietary cleaning mechanism, but would do nothing in other manufacturers drives.
I don't ever remember hearing about a floppy drive with this capability. It would certainly be possible to invent such a thing, but consider that you'd have to use a material that was soft enough not to damage the head, but durable enough to have metal dragged across it repeatedly without getting torn to shreds. The fibrous material used on the "wet" type disk cleaners gets pretty frayed with repeated use, but since they're not an internal component built into the drive itself, you can throw them away and buy brand new ones anytime.
OK, so this is really really a longshot, but what about if this isn't a cleaning disk but rather a utility which activates some kind of firmware command on a specific model of TEAC drive that tells it to scrub the heads, or there's a non data signal on the disk to make it do it like the Zip drive Z-tracks? Maybe it only does something if you have the right drive/driver installed? Possibly try it with a TEAC 3.5" drive to see if it does something else.
It’s just a placebo disk for those who were used to cleaning their cassette and vhs heads in the past. People will buy anything, especially if they are using new tech at the time. Anyone remember “colour” screens to place on your B&W TV?
The only thing I can imagine is that the TEAC one looking like regular media is something like it is used with LTO and DDS tape drives. It works by using the fact that it is just a bit rougher than a regular tape. And these look identical as well. As new tapes are rougher than used ones, they have the same effect to some extent. If this exists for floppys as well, it could be a true cleaning disk, but a fake as well. I had a VHS cleaner that played video and didn't understand how it worked, could only be this system with a rough tape like the DDS system uses
Maybe it was just a money maker (scam)? There were many more people who didn't know any better than those who did. You've got the cost of the disk and the packaging, which were likely a lot less than what they could sell them for.
I had one of these TEAC "cleaning discs" it came with a floppy drive from Maplins I think. I just chucked it in a drawer until I encountered a drive that needed cleaning. I invested in some IPA to put on the surface as I was always a little puzzled as to why it didn't come with any, I was stunned when I slid the shutter aside to see a normal disc surface! I assumed I had been conned and I'm pretty sure I just formatted it and used it as storage. I don't recall actually running the disc though.
Or maybe "cleaning" is sort of a joke term for "exercising" the floppy drive mechanism. Which I think is also kind of placebo think, but I remember someone has told me that floppy drives should be used time after time to extend its lifetime. So it's sort of different kind of routine utility.
Well my wild guess is that maybe the data is written on that disk in a very specific way physically (sectors/tracks), so when the program starts it does some very heavy (or fast) movement inside, which is usually never done, so it causes more friction thus "cleaning" the head.. So the image of the disk or any copy will not work because it needs very special file placement across the disk from the factory..
I have two ideas for the Teac one. Was there a very different Teac Floppy drive with a service hole in which you can put in a cleaning solution? First time you ran the Teac one it moved through the full floppy moving the head and making a loud noise. Maybe you are supposed to run it with an open Floopy Drive case, and while it is reading the data you must add lubricant to the rails or just clean them with a brush? So it is not a Disc Head cleaner, it is a floppy drive rail unstucker?
Yeah dude it doesn't do anything. If you think that's the only thing then booooy have I got stories for you. Placebos are common: crosswalk buttons, thermostats in many offices, elevator door close buttons, etc. *whispers* they don't do anything
The only thing I can think of judging by how it sounded in the previous video is the Teac one has its data arranged in a way that when reading it shakes the head continuously - and by that it "cleans" the head.
I'll bet that Teac cleaner disk isn't a head cleaner, it's a rail "cleaner". The way the data on the disk is formatted probably forces the head to travel the whole length of the rails in the drive which would refresh the oils on the rails in cases of humid atmosphere or old slightly rusty rails. If you checked the bits layout on the disc you might even find it purposefully super fragmented across the whole data area.
What if teac isn't clearing the reader itself but the moving parts. Just has deta in a way that forces the moving parts to jiggle in a specific way that can cause it to jiggle free some dust and grime? Iirc the teac had multiple discs.. maybe one was for the actual reader and the one you have for the moving parts?
Maybe its really just a tester? For after manually cleaning/regreasing? its a strecth but it does seem to make the head move all the way from the center to the edge of the disk. i dunno just spit balling here. anyways i need at least 4 more videos dedicated to this floppy. i swear i had one as a kid... i think i formatted it and put something else on it. :P
OK, so not a floppy cleaner in the traditional sense, but what about if it was a way to make the head "vibrate" or move quicker than it usually would to shake dust loose? You mention some different sounds when it was running the cleaning animation so maybe that is the trick behind it? Not sure if there is any way to test that though?
You know you've wandered onto a strange road when you can talk for nearly 15 minutes about a floppy disk cleaner. "All the trees looked strange to him, and he knew he was far away from home". :-)
have you tried making an image of the 'cleaning disk' and writing it on a new floppy? see if it errors out because it is now on a normal floppy? (personally I don't think the teac cleaning disk does anything hehe)
I think it's supposed to be like a vibration cleaner, move the head back and forth a lot, like some modern DLSRs have a ultrasonic cleaner in them to just shake dust loose, I think it's a similar concept, maybe the data is written in such a way to cause the head to move a lot to access it.
I feel that the weird disc cleaner may have had a 2nd dry type disc with it, it seems to me that it is used to "clean" the mechanism of the drive and make sure it moves to each sector properly, not a head cleaner, so i imagine you would use a dry type disc cleaner for the heads, *then* you could use that disc cleaner which moves the mechanism along and so on, having these in tandem would avoid the need to open up the drive or the program will at least show you there is an error if it fails. Kinda usefully actually.
I think the TEAC thing is snake oil. It's something your mom would buy over a real cleaning disk because it has music and animation, so it *must* be doing something, right?
Ultimately, the teac is probably snake oil, but I'm also wondering if the "Cleaning" is just the disc making the drive read the whole disk essentially "scrubbing" on the magnetic surface? I don't know if there is some way to see how much of the length of the disc the drive head is sweeping across?
I hope LGR wrote the date on the disk. Yes, it mars the pristine nature of the label, but the disk itself has already been marred, so it would be nice to have a record of when that occurred for anyone stumbling on it in the future.
I'm 100% sure the TEAC "Floppy Head Cleaner" diskette is nothing but a gag gift. Like it doesn't actually clean anything, but it does have a cleaner cleaning something within it via animation.
Considering it says "Stained Head will bring data error", I would guess this was bundled with an actual cleaning disk, and that this was there to check if your floppy drive actually needed cleaning or not.
Oh! So I talked to the owner of a computer shop near my work, and you often come up. He mentioned the "floppy cleaner diskette" you had. He said that 20ish years ago, they used to take blank floppies, and just write a program on them that would move the head back and forth a lot to "exercise" the drive, and slapped a "disk cleaner" sticker on the front. He also mentioned that it was pretty much snake oil, and they'd give them away with purchases for peace of mind.
I think it was some sort of sector-by-sector disk checker or something.
I remember those. Basically garbage, but the idea was to work the head across the spectrum to stretch it out so to speak.
The HD on the disk tells me its just a normal disk with junk files on it. I bet you can even format it!
Thought that from the beginning, would've been better as a 'hard disc' cleaner (saving time via a bootloader to auto-format a hard drive)
So snake oil with extra steps. Duh, I don't even know why are people trying so hard to find a purpose for the teac :D Obvious BS, don't act like fraudsters haven't existed since the beginning of time...
@@cueball981 i recon too, you just wipe the disk and re use it.
Somwhere an ex TEAC employee is watching this, laughing and thinking “they still fall for it” 🤠
There's no way that software was made by TEAC, the diskette maybe was.
@@0raffie0 The sticker was!
@@dwaynezilla the ink was
@@AlwaysBolttheBird the audience was!
@@lockinhinddanger934 I was!
It’s a placebo disk to sell to people that “need a disk cleaner” old computer shop I worked at had several gimmicks people requested. They would complain real disk cleaners “didn’t do anything”
Reminds me of how some modern software shows loading bars just to make the user think it is doing something because no one will believe it finished in less than one second.
Computer hypochondriacs 😅
@threedoubleyou dotcom so because a company exists that means they can't won't sell snake oil? 😂
Exactly!!! Anyone can slap onto a blank floppy disk a sticker with a brand name printed on it!
@threedoubleyou dotcom I doubt seriously Teac had anything to do with it.
UFOs? Bermuda Triangle? Big Foot? No, we’re talking real mysteries here, like a Japanese floppy cleaner from the 90s that looks exactly like a normal floppy.
sadako will call you in 7 day after using it
History channel wishes it had content this riveting.
SCP wants to give it a number.
I had a similar disc a long long time ago, but the disc was split into two sections, half the program the second part was dry head cleaner. I have a feeling your disc is a pirate of this disc, I will try find my boxes of discs to see if I can find it and photograph it for you.
Ooh. Feel free to email me if you find it: Clint@lazygamereviews.com
So I downloaded the floppy image and opened the hex editor to browse through the files for any clues. What I found was:
- The graphics are in MAKIchan Graphics format, and the meta-data in the header shows that two different computers were used to make the graphics: "98SA" (I assume a PC98) and "MPS" (no idea)
- The Metadata for these MAKIchan files just says "C-lab. Floppy Disk Drive Head Cleaner" and nothing else.
- It was compiled using Borland TurboPascal for Windows Version 7.0
- Some long searching reveals that this file is one component of the sound driver (specifically for the PC-98): github.com/mistydemeo/pmdmini/blob/master/src/pmdwin/ppsdrv.h -- note one of the comments referring to 1994 as an example date, so it's era appropriate
- There is a long string of 16-bit characters at the top of one of the files (OPNDRV.COM offset 608). Assuming it IS UTF-16 then it spits out Chinese characters rather than Japanese.
- There is not a SINGLE reference to TEAC *anywhere* in any of the files.
So with the meta-data not containing any reference to TEAC, a lack of any copyright information except for the NaoNeko sound driver v0.1, the random insertion of Chinese text into the audio driver and then the physical label on the floppy disk itself looking really poorly made for a company like TEAC makes me think it's a fake disk, in the sense of it being sold by a shady company using the TEAC branding rather than TEAC themselves pushing it out there as snake oil for use in stores.
If someone wants to try and better translate the HEX for the text data into a more legible form, here's the dump of it. I got most of the Chinese characters out of it, but either I don't have the full character set installed or it's not actually UTF-16 and it just happens to line up. Either way, it's REALLY strange that it's just... there. The NaoNeko sound driver is Japanese so you'd think it'd show Japanese characters but, nope.
6A028F02 B602DF02 0B033903 6A039E03 D5031004 4E048F04 E80E120E 480D890C D50B2B0B 8A0AF309 6409DD08 5E08E607 74070907 A4064406 EA059505 4505F904 B2046F04 2F04F303 BA038403 52032203 F502CB02 A3027D02 59023702 1702F901 DD01C201 A9019101 7B016501 51013E01 2D011C01 0C01FD00 EF00E100 D400C900 BD00B300 A9009F00 96008E00 86007E00 77007100 6A006400 5F005900 54005000 4B004700 43003F00 3C003800 35003200 2F002D00 2A002800 26002300 21002000 1E001C00 1B001900 18001600 15001400 13001200 11001000 200AFB09 220A2A0A 360A3E0A 430A480A 510A5A0A 630AC10A E20AF40A FA0A250B 200A200A 200A520B 6C0B760B 810B8C0B 970BA20B AA0BC40B D60BEC0B 050C0000
While Unicode existed in the 90s I don't think it was that popular back then, especially on DOS or Windows 9x. Maybe it's in another encoding?
@@marcusaureliusf I've tried several encodings and I can't get any of them to display anything legible (and encodings like Shift-JIS just throws up a bunch of errors). Plus, some characters seem to start with with values too high for some standards of Japanese text encoding. UTF-16 is the best I can find. What we really need is someone with a PC98; character set might not be so backwards compatible as I first thought.
C-lab. (with the included period), is a Japanese video game and computer software developer by the way. This would have been right up their alley.
I don't think the data at the top of OPENDRV is actual text (for PC98/DOS/Win 3.1 it would absolutely not be Unicode, Unicode is too new). But the bottom of OPENDRV contains some error messages in Shift-JIS
ＦＭ音源ドライバー Ver. 0.1
(c) 1994 naoneko. all rights reserved.
$ＦＭ音源ドライバーは常駐していません。
$ＦＭ音源ドライバーを解放しました。
$ＦＭ音源ボードが見つかりません。
$ＦＭ音源ドライバーがすでに常駐しています。
That disk is basically the longest troll ever.
I think "all your base are belong to us" is a pretty good contender to the title. LOL
The real value of these experiments is getting to hear the teac music on repeat
"the teac music" is a movement from the classical era song called "The Four Seasons" by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi; Concerto No. 1 in E major, "La primavera" (Spring).
@@Psythik Yes, I know. It's also The TEAC Music. Just like Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 "Eroica" 2nd Movement is also "The Civilization 2 Gandhi Just Nuked Somebody Music".
So, the TEAC works as a HDD cleaner too? Bonus!
And even as a SDD cleaner. What an awesome product!
@@wohlhabendermanager I bet it works on RAM disks! Very versatile tool!
If you run a copy directly from OneDrive, it will clean Microsoft's cloud servers' drives, too.
@@BilisNegra Good idea, I'm gonna do that and send them an invoice for cleaning their equipment
You keep telling the other people to watch the first one, yet they keep asking questions the first one answered. I feel your pain :(
Seriously though.
I'm _still_ getting "THERE'S BRUSHES ON THE DISK, ROTATE IT AROUND." 🙃
@@LGRBlerbs 🤦♀️
@@LGRBlerbs But that doesn't even make SENSE. Brushes would just damage the head and make things worse!
@@LGRBlerbs Maybe they know it and are just asking for fun, like asking Strong Bad how does he type with boxing gloves on.
@@LGRBlerbs To do that you'd need some sort of device that holds the disk in place and has an attachment that lets you turn it. I don't think there is any such contraption.
I originally thought it was a "prank" disk. Back in the late 80s, I had a disk you could run that would display a false C prompt on the screen. When any command was entered, it would display an error message (possibly a virus warning) and say that the floppy drive needed to be 'cleaned.' It would then play the sound of running water and move the drive head back and forth as if it were an agitator then finish with a "spin" cycle.
Oh yes, I remember this one! 😁
LOL!!
Even found a video of it, but sadly the sound is played much too fast, on my machine the whole process lasted about 20-30s (Commodore PC-10, a XT-Clone).
ruclips.net/video/5FhCyftAcbU/видео.html
I'm also pretty sure this is how I caught my first computer virus, 170x, AFAIR
Do you happen to know a video recording of this? It sounds amazing.
The High Density logo on the Teac disk makes me think it's a bog standard floppy and just a placebo!
I noticed that too
My thoughts on the Teac is that by simply accessing the disk - the physical motion of the drive heads moving repeatedly - is what they consider "cleaning" it. The heads are now cleaner because they.. moved a lot. It's all I got.
Does anyone else remember a screen saver that "cleaned" your monitor from the inside out?
I feel kind of bad sending that TEAC disk now and sending you down that rabbit hole haha I really just assumed it was was placebo and didn't do any cleaning. Unlike your new cleaning disk
how could you? :)
@@Locomamonk I did have a good laugh as well watching this unfold. Should have sent it for April fools haha
What if the first one is a prank disk? You ran a "floppy disc cleaner" and got an animation of someone cleaning. A cleaner on a floppy disk.
I was thinking the same thing. I can't imagine a counterfeit or rippoff product would go to the trouble of including software for something this simple plus the whole thing gives off a WinBlows95 vibe.
Uhm, LGR actually talked about that in the video mate, maybe watch before you comment. :P
I was thinking the same thing...
The Teac disk tricks you into making a RUclips video about it years after it was commercially available. 😁
It is still exercising the drive (helpful when old gears are stuck), it just doesn't offer anything that you couldn't do with a normal format.
The TEAC has to be some black market ripoff thing that some manufacturer slapped the TEAC logo on.
I feel the TEAC disk is a fake. Kind of like the Memory Doubler software from so many years ago. lol
DoubleSpace. Now there was a damn insufferable thing to support when people I had to support were determined to use it.
The concept of total loss of data didn't appear to bother them.
Weren't there some drivers or something that would sit between the OS and the physical disks/RAM and force an on-the-fly compression/decompression of data to increase space at the cost of performance?
@@tiagotiagot yes, some sys driver and because it was rather big, 40k or so, people tried using memory optimizers like Qemm and such making it even more fragile to use hardrive compression 😄
It'd be interesting to load the .exe on the teac disk into Ghidra and see what it's doing beyond the GUI, if anything.
Please do and post on his subreddit!
Is this .exe available anywhere?
The link to the image is in the description under previous video.
I reverse engineer the programs from the earlier video, and they did absolutely nothing besides load images in some pc98 format.
Thank you. I had hoped someone would do that.That would rule out it being a bootleg of some sort of hybrid disk, as such a disk would need to do some sort of seek on the disk.
but there are some fdd sounds during "cleaning"?
@@nicklaich From what they are saying, that would just be the program accessing the files on the disk.
The teac floppy looks like someone bought a bulk load of disks and sold them indivually with a label....
That's it exactly if you ask me. Same thing goes on in that part of the world today, but with phone knockoffs, where it has 12 cameras but only 1 real camera inside. and a fingerprint scanner that just knows when the screen is touched, you can unlock it with your dic.. I mean nose.
Yeah it's just a scam. They've bought standard floppies cheap and then sold them with the software/label claiming to be a cleaning disk for a lot more.
Opened some files in a hex editor.. It looks like the ".MAG" files are MAKI02 format images. You can open them with this web viewer: recoil.sourceforge.net/web.html
14 minutes of getting dry head? Only because it's you, Clint.
Someone, some time ago, decided to put time into a drive cleaning scam disk. They made 10s of dollars!
It really is a pretty elaborate no-op.
Could it have been for magneto-optic drives that TEAC made and were quite popular in Japan? There's a patent for using the magnetic surface to focus the optical part for cleaning. patents.justia.com/patent/6973011
MO disks are thicker, so a floppy disk wouldn't hold inside the drive.
The royal Diskdrive is clean, your Highness.
I find it amusing that so many people can't accept that that head cleaner disk is just a scam. They *really want* it to be real. 😂
“I want to believe.” - Fox Mulder, _The X-Files_
I'm not dismissing the possibility that it could be fake, but i also think it's quite likely that it was originally part of a set, consisting of a data disk and an actual cleaning disk.
@@KGB240 If so, why is there absolutely zero indication of that?
Does the files in the disk use the whole 1.44 MB? Does the label looks like it has been factory printed? If the answer to both questions is no there's a good chance that someone just copied the contents of an actual cleaning floppy (that contains data + cleaning) and just put them in a blank disk with a fake label and made a quick buck. And if that's the case, it means that there's a real disk somewhere and eventually someone will send you and we will have another Blerbs video. Yay!
TEAC still exists. Ask them. :-)
My guess is that's not actually made by TEAC. They don't seem like the type of company to put their name on something like that. Probably something someone made to sell cheaper than the real thing.
Kinda what I was thinking, there was tons of crazy crap coming out in the 80s and 90s for PCs and everyone wanted a piece of the action, I think the idea behind the program was to read through all the sectors of a floppy, rattle the heads around and maybe that would "knock off" some dust who knows.
Yeah. I suspect it to be some kind of bootleg as well.
Okay, what's the next crazy theory we can come up with on how this disk theoretically works so Clint has to try it again to satiate his curiosity while amusing us?
Maybe we can convince him to adapt these videos for an episode of Oddware, it certainly qualifies 😄
My theory is that it is rapidly moving the head back and forth kind of like those “floppy disk music” videos do to produce sound. Perhaps if the head is vibrated at the right frequency it knocks the dust off.
He needs to (or have somelese) decompile it to see what the code does, line by line.
@@PhilGlockner That's the only thing that makes any sort of sense to me at this point. I can get the logic behind the theory but I just can't see it working at all.
It arranges a set of bits in memory to form a symbolic invocation of the ancient Hittite god of clean floppy disk drives, then directs electronic prayers at it.
Alternatively, it sets up a CPU instruction that resonates at the exact frequency of the great galactic blancmange, which extends itself 5th-dimensionally into the floppy disk drive and abducts all the dirt particles for its own nefarious purposes.
in wrestling terms, these cleaning floppies have worked you into a shoot, brother
Go home, smark.
@@AsukaLangleyS02 IT’S STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT
At least it didn't kick his leg out from his leg
Maybe it pairs with a TEAC drive that has internal cleaning pads. And running the executable parks and unparks the head to these special areas or something. Maybe the access pattern of the head makes it shed some dirt. Fast wiggling. Who knows.
Hey Clint,as for the TEAC Disk, I was wondering if they might have a file with a changing byte pattern on it.
This "might" magnetize/demagnetize the heads the same way as you can do with a screwdriver. Of course a floppy will always read different bytes and therefore it shouldn't get stuck on one polarization, but who knows? You could open up the files in a hex editor to see the pattern or even look for api calls in the exe... or just leave it like it is 😁 great video as always!
My life's goal is to send Clint something so mysterious as to generate 2 follow up videos on it's very existance.
I suppose the TEAC one is a placebo disk of sorts, but the act of having the data spread across the disk will no doubt force the head to move along the rails, and read different parts of the disk. Perhaps its to help keep the drive in good working order by doing this. Very odd!
[Edit: seems others have also come to the same conclusion. Snake Oil under the guise of keeping the drive working at its best and giving it excercise :D ]
Okay so i JUST REMEBERED that while looking at some obscure media stuff a couple years back I found a twitter thread just FULL of animations for these types of things, but like including VHS, DVD, even game consoles like the SEGA CD and Saturn! I know youtube doesnt like it when people put links in the comments so it was posted by MaxKriegerVG on May 1st 2019. If you use twitter's advance search it should pop right up
That teac one was definitely a scam I bet. One of those placebo discs that make people think it's doing something when it's not
6:50
_IBM Thinkpad humming noises have entered the chat._
Possibly the Teac came with some kind of alcohol-based paste that you must spread on the disk surface before inserting into the drive (or maybe there's something inside the disk, I'd love to see a teardown).
The Teac one looks like a bootleg to me
I think someone just bought a box of blank disks, made some animations, printed off labels, and sold them to unsuspecting shoppers
I don’t know why, but now I want a floppy drive cleaner for my Mavica cameras lol
Cleaner disks would make sense on Mavicas, because disassembling them enough to get to the heads with a cotton swab is much more difficult than with a regular desktop drive. Still haven't cleaned mine (which I got years ago, prompted by LGR and 8BG reviewing them) but it does work flawlessly for now...
Maybe the TEAC is an emulated cleaning disk that you use to clean a Gotek? :P
I remember using the dry type pretty often back in the day. It worked like the disk in this video. The OS never recognized it. I was pretty shocked when I started getting CD-ROMs that were cleaners that were recognized by the system. It was pretty surreal back then.
@Brandon Taylor seems like it cleansed it of the willingness to work, so yeah, that was a good cleaning CD.
"Your laser lens has now been thoroughly cleaned."
Maybe the floppy head cleaner is not a cleaner for the floppy, but the cleaner for your *head*? Like you look at the animation, you listen the music, relax and get your head clean.
But the manual states “if you require cleaning of other *drives* , (...)”, so that can’t be it either
I guess it was like the "DVD Rewinder" of the 3.5" floppy disk world? Very bizarre, did you upload the contents of the first disk anywhere?
I see that you did on the previous video now!
Hey, maybe in disk inside have something clever. You can try spin around it in slide open, maybe have something adapt the film itself.
Final can do, tear it appart.
Clint angrily swapping Floppy Disks is me refreshing LGR Foods... To no avail. /Watches old videos
Man that channel vibes so hard, I wish Clint had more spare time for it.
A 1990s bootleg scam product! Gotta be.
Marketed to make people think it was "cleaning" when in fact nope just a quick buck scam I say....
I dunno. I liked the loud slamming down of the disk at the beginning of the video. Probably unintentional, but it's like starting the video off by saying "Look at this stupid crap!"
Me too. My comment on the first version just said “PLAP! Great start to a video.”
You should've tried using a dual-floppy machine, you should've put one disk in drive A and it would clean drive B. Works even better with quad floppy drive setup! You just put Teac disk in drive A, dry cleaner in drive B, wet cleaner in drive C and a piece of paper in drive D. And all you drives will be cleaned! Also if you have CD-ROM attached, it will be cleaned as well, both inside and outside.
It took me until the end to realise this was sarcasm, lol
You'll never need to use "retrobrite" after this method!
At this point I think we can conclude the thing is just a fancy scam. If a data-only disc _could_ do something to "clean" a head, at most it would be some sort of degaussing where it commands the head to write alternating 1s and 0s over and over to demagnetize parts, but that would imply the head is made of some form of ferrous metal that can be magnetized to begin with, in which case it would just outright not work as a magnetic reader....
LGR added a whole 6 minutes to this video
My guess, is the first disk you received was more of a 'motor exercise' program than a head cleaner, judging from the everything different about a cloth disk... I could only imagine a few sample sizes this might be useful for (back then), people who only made smaller files that didn't reach the latter sectors of a disk, or ever rarely... It just sounded like it was moving the head to max and min on the rail.
I'm only 5 mins in on the video, but I'm hoping my comment isn't out of turn, lol
edit: did you _really_ have to try to access an unformattabe disk? 🤣
I'm pretty sure what's happening with the TEAC floppy is this:
1. TEAC used to manufacture floppy disk drives
2. Lots of people probably ran floppy disk cleaners in them
3. Since these cleaners physically touch the read/write head, lots of people must have damaged their TEAC drives using these cleaners
4. They then sent them in to TEAC under warranty
TEAC must have decided that the best course of action is to give these people a disk cleaner that was officially supported on their drives, and would not actually damage the drives, as many of the "real" cleaners did. Keep in mind that these head cleaners were mostly a pretty bad idea. In 99% of cases, floppy drives ran just fine without any cleaning, and inserting something that physically interfered with the read/write head was much more likely to damage things, rather than help with anything. So this was most likely TEAC's way of trying to prevent their customers from damaging their drives, and then sending them in under warranty.
Did TEAC ever produce floppy drives of their own? My thought is perhaps the TEAC disk contained some sort of data or signal that activated a proprietary cleaning mechanism, but would do nothing in other manufacturers drives.
I don't ever remember hearing about a floppy drive with this capability. It would certainly be possible to invent such a thing, but consider that you'd have to use a material that was soft enough not to damage the head, but durable enough to have metal dragged across it repeatedly without getting torn to shreds. The fibrous material used on the "wet" type disk cleaners gets pretty frayed with repeated use, but since they're not an internal component built into the drive itself, you can throw them away and buy brand new ones anytime.
TEAC make floppy drives, maybe this floppy is only for a TEAC floppy drive with a kind o self cleaning build in
OK, so this is really really a longshot, but what about if this isn't a cleaning disk but rather a utility which activates some kind of firmware command on a specific model of TEAC drive that tells it to scrub the heads, or there's a non data signal on the disk to make it do it like the Zip drive Z-tracks? Maybe it only does something if you have the right drive/driver installed? Possibly try it with a TEAC 3.5" drive to see if it does something else.
It’s just a placebo disk for those who were used to cleaning their cassette and vhs heads in the past. People will buy anything, especially if they are using new tech at the time. Anyone remember “colour” screens to place on your B&W TV?
The only thing I can imagine is that the TEAC one looking like regular media is something like it is used with LTO and DDS tape drives. It works by using the fact that it is just a bit rougher than a regular tape. And these look identical as well. As new tapes are rougher than used ones, they have the same effect to some extent. If this exists for floppys as well, it could be a true cleaning disk, but a fake as well. I had a VHS cleaner that played video and didn't understand how it worked, could only be this system with a rough tape like the DDS system uses
Extra LGR? For clarification? You’re really spoiling us!
MY QUESTION GOT ANSWERED IN THE REUPLOAD. So I was wrong, it won't work from the hard disk. Cheers anyway!!
No, if you ran this off your HDD it’d be a hard disk cleaner.
I still think this might be a "store kiosk demonstation" thing...? Either that or just plain snake oil, like some audio "enahncements"...
Maybe it was just a money maker (scam)? There were many more people who didn't know any better than those who did. You've got the cost of the disk and the packaging, which were likely a lot less than what they could sell them for.
I fucking love blerbs. This could be the only LGR channel and I would be satiated.
I had one of these TEAC "cleaning discs" it came with a floppy drive from Maplins I think. I just chucked it in a drawer until I encountered a drive that needed cleaning. I invested in some IPA to put on the surface as I was always a little puzzled as to why it didn't come with any, I was stunned when I slid the shutter aside to see a normal disc surface! I assumed I had been conned and I'm pretty sure I just formatted it and used it as storage. I don't recall actually running the disc though.
Or maybe "cleaning" is sort of a joke term for "exercising" the floppy drive mechanism. Which I think is also kind of placebo think, but I remember someone has told me that floppy drives should be used time after time to extend its lifetime. So it's sort of different kind of routine utility.
Well my wild guess is that maybe the data is written on that disk in a very specific way physically (sectors/tracks), so when the program starts it does some very heavy (or fast) movement inside, which is usually never done, so it causes more friction thus "cleaning" the head.. So the image of the disk or any copy will not work because it needs very special file placement across the disk from the factory..
I wonder if (some / a specific) Teac floppy drives had some kind of cleaner built-in, that was started by this disc.
I have two ideas for the Teac one.
Was there a very different Teac Floppy drive with a service hole in which you can put in a cleaning solution?
First time you ran the Teac one it moved through the full floppy moving the head and making a loud noise. Maybe you are supposed to run it with an open Floopy Drive case, and while it is reading the data you must add lubricant to the rails or just clean them with a brush? So it is not a Disc Head cleaner, it is a floppy drive rail unstucker?
Yeah dude it doesn't do anything. If you think that's the only thing then booooy have I got stories for you. Placebos are common: crosswalk buttons, thermostats in many offices, elevator door close buttons, etc. *whispers* they don't do anything
The only thing I can think of judging by how it sounded in the previous video is the Teac one has its data arranged in a way that when reading it shakes the head continuously - and by that it "cleans" the head.
I think it's just a fake/joke disk. I'd like to look through the .EXE(s) w/ a hex editor to see if there's any readable info about the creator.
I'll bet that Teac cleaner disk isn't a head cleaner, it's a rail "cleaner". The way the data on the disk is formatted probably forces the head to travel the whole length of the rails in the drive which would refresh the oils on the rails in cases of humid atmosphere or old slightly rusty rails. If you checked the bits layout on the disc you might even find it purposefully super fragmented across the whole data area.
What if teac isn't clearing the reader itself but the moving parts.
Just has deta in a way that forces the moving parts to jiggle in a specific way that can cause it to jiggle free some dust and grime?
Iirc the teac had multiple discs.. maybe one was for the actual reader and the one you have for the moving parts?
Maybe its really just a tester? For after manually cleaning/regreasing? its a strecth but it does seem to make the head move all the way from the center to the edge of the disk. i dunno just spit balling here. anyways i need at least 4 more videos dedicated to this floppy. i swear i had one as a kid... i think i formatted it and put something else on it. :P
Do a collaboration with Thought Emporium. I believe he has a microscope.
OK, so not a floppy cleaner in the traditional sense, but what about if it was a way to make the head "vibrate" or move quicker than it usually would to shake dust loose? You mention some different sounds when it was running the cleaning animation so maybe that is the trick behind it? Not sure if there is any way to test that though?
You know you've wandered onto a strange road when you can talk for nearly 15 minutes about a floppy disk cleaner. "All the trees looked strange to him, and he knew he was far away from home". :-)
I think the Teac disk needs some snake oil on it. 😂
have you tried making an image of the 'cleaning disk' and writing it on a new floppy? see if it errors out because it is now on a normal floppy? (personally I don't think the teac cleaning disk does anything hehe)
I think it's supposed to be like a vibration cleaner, move the head back and forth a lot, like some modern DLSRs have a ultrasonic cleaner in them to just shake dust loose, I think it's a similar concept, maybe the data is written in such a way to cause the head to move a lot to access it.
The new disk is different looking because it’s low density! :-D Totally different medium.
Did you run a virus scan on the "cleaning" disk? It's either a virus installer or a placebo.
Honestly I prefer the camera mic vs the studio mic, more a classic LGR sound
I feel that the weird disc cleaner may have had a 2nd dry type disc with it, it seems to me that it is used to "clean" the mechanism of the drive and make sure it moves to each sector properly, not a head cleaner, so i imagine you would use a dry type disc cleaner for the heads, *then* you could use that disc cleaner which moves the mechanism along and so on, having these in tandem would avoid the need to open up the drive or the program will at least show you there is an error if it fails. Kinda usefully actually.
FYI, you can view hidden files in DOS as well -- just type dir /ah. The "ah" switch specifies "all hidden."
Gotta love DOS
It's for "attribute: hidden" actually - dir /ad only shows directories, for example :-)
@@widicamdotnet I stand corrected! Thank you.
If you want to view all files, hidden or not, you can just use the /a flag without a suffix.
@@eDoc2020 Oh, wow. I didn't even know that! Thanks for the tip!
I still say the mystery disk is a scam product they sold to people claiming it cleaned when all it did was add 5 or 10 dollars to the Receipt.
Well, there's your answer! The Teac on is a Floppy _DISC_ Cleaner! Not a Floppy *DRIVE* cleaner! You're supposed to rub it on a floppy disc!
I think the TEAC thing is snake oil. It's something your mom would buy over a real cleaning disk because it has music and animation, so it *must* be doing something, right?
Ultimately, the teac is probably snake oil, but I'm also wondering if the "Cleaning" is just the disc making the drive read the whole disk essentially "scrubbing" on the magnetic surface? I don't know if there is some way to see how much of the length of the disc the drive head is sweeping across?
I hope LGR wrote the date on the disk. Yes, it mars the pristine nature of the label, but the disk itself has already been marred, so it would be nice to have a record of when that occurred for anyone stumbling on it in the future.
I'm 100% sure the TEAC "Floppy Head Cleaner" diskette is nothing but a gag gift. Like it doesn't actually clean anything, but it does have a cleaner cleaning something within it via animation.
But homie isn't cleaning a picture of a head, he's cleaning a picture of a tree.
Was thinking that or a bootleg
Can you remember when we could respond to a video with a video????
WOOOOOOW
And then the reply girls killed it.
We're at a point now when the japanese multi-corporation responsible for this should send Clint a video in which all of this is explained.
Much like that one Simpsons episode.
@@Mick_92 Mister Sparkle!
Considering it says "Stained Head will bring data error", I would guess this was bundled with an actual cleaning disk, and that this was there to check if your floppy drive actually needed cleaning or not.
Wait, you may well be right. In other words it's just a disk to check whether cleaning is necessary.
I used these back in the day, all I did was put the disk in... then fire up a command prompt and run DIR A: a few times until I was happy.