Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology have developed an optical disc with a capacity of over a petabit of data, equivalent to well...
Assuming the software isn’t lost, then yeah, typically it can be emulated or reverse engineered to work.
The bigger hurdle is the hardware, especially if the encoding of the data was proprietary, meaning that even if you could get a reading without it, you’d still need to figure out how to decode it into useful data
That’s the only hurdle if you have the software and decoding both of which are emulateable. Which wouldn’t be overly hard to reverse engineer a connector if you have everything else…
Aren’t most of those emulateable in dos-box or similar programs?
Assuming the software isn’t lost, then yeah, typically it can be emulated or reverse engineered to work.
The bigger hurdle is the hardware, especially if the encoding of the data was proprietary, meaning that even if you could get a reading without it, you’d still need to figure out how to decode it into useful data
How do you emulate reading from a physical medium?
That’s the only hurdle if you have the software and decoding both of which are emulateable. Which wouldn’t be overly hard to reverse engineer a connector if you have everything else…