Introduction to the Level 9 archive

Mike Austin, Feb 2025.

The Level 9 archive is based on around 1000 floppy disks from various systems which were preserved from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Of these, about 500 were successfully read between 2021 and 2024, mainly using an Atari ST emulator running on a PC.

This GitHub repo is a work in progress. Here are some of the folders which I have processed so far.

"floppy disk archive"

contains the files from the floppy disks retrieved from the Level 9 archive. some if the disks could not be read due to degradation of the media. However, in many cases there are several copies of affected folders/systems, so I have tried to pull together all the necessary files from multiple disks into the following folders:

"game sources"

contains source codes for specific games

"sys sources"

contains source code for both the game authoring system (squasher, acode compiler, etc.) and the runtime systems.

"sys sources/docs"

contains a manual for the overall system converted to MS Word from the original which was in 1st word format

Next steps

1. As noted above, documentation needs converting into modern formats.
2. There are about 20,000 sheets of paper to be scanned.
3. There are many floppy disks still to be read
4. More source disk folders need to be sorted to get consistent sets of system and game source codes
5. underlying system software like acode compiler, squasher and interpreters need to be compiled and got working on more modern systems.