Data Recovery

~ 2 Minute Read.

I spent the last three days re­cov­er­ing old projects.

There is this one 2TB ex­ter­nal hard drive I had for ages, bro­ken for six years – yet I nev­er threw it away or tried to for­mat it to maybe be able use it again. That’s be­cause I knew it con­tained mem­o­ries. Not im­ages or videos from when I was a kid, but much more im­por­tant: it was the on­ly place where I had stored my first pro­gram­ming, game pro­gram­ming and blender projects.

I even found projects I to­tal­ly for­got about:

  • “Baller”, a 2D top down shoot­er at­tempt
  • “Blue­Moon”, a space­ship game at­tempt in­spired by Gala­ga,
  • “Loop”, a mi­di sam­pler ap­pli­ca­tion which was sup­posed to al­low you to over­lay re­peat­ing pre­de­fined loops,
  • “Labyrinth”, an ac­tion RPG at­tempt based on a project from the games pro­gram­ming book 2 I learnt with orig­i­nal­ly.

Af­ter fail­ing with the first re­cov­ery with Pir­i­form’s Re­cu­va, EaseUS was able to show me the most im­por­tant files in its tri­al ver­sion. The mo­ment when I un­fold­ed the “Eclipsec++” di­rec­to­ry and found QuadEngine was ele­cri­fy­ing and near­ly brought me to tears. If you put enough heart and time in­to a project it’s like see­ing an old friend again af­ter a long time. 3

A long self de­bate lat­er on whether to pur­chase the full ver­sion for 80€ (which is a lot cur­rent­ly), I got the li­cense and now have ac­cess to the source code of all these projects again.

I will be grad­u­al­ly open sourc­ing them, start­ing with the big­ger ones, Py­ro­ma­nia and Zom­biehunt, for ar­chiv­ing pur­pos­es and to give peo­ple a chance to play around with them.

1
Ac­tu­al­ly not ev­ery­thing per se: I’m still miss­ing LEGO Park­our II and a jump and run game, but maybe I just need to search longer.
2
“Spielepro­gram­mierung” by Lennart Steinke
3
I re­al­ize this is a weird anal­o­gy, but I cared a lot about these projects. It is just and anal­o­gy btw… my projects were not my on­ly friends, don’t wor­ry! ;P

Writ­ten in 30 min­utes, ed­it­ed in 10 min­utes.