Kuala Lumpur July 2025 "A prayer answered"
08/09/25 22:46
A very long time ago I had a job as a computer programmer. I had learnt programming at University, bought one of the first PCs made for the public and won a national award for a computer game I had written. I went on to write complex and challenging games, well for their time that is, but I stopped doing that just before VDU screens had colour and graphics. There is a certain irony now in reminding myself that I didn't think I could make a career out of games writing! The story I am going to recount is about the last game I wrote, a simulation of my train travelling hobby in the 1980s. Written in the early 1990s to run using the pre-Windows operating system (MS-DOS) I pushed the limits of what PCs of that age could do and in so doing had to make compromises to get it to fit the memory of those machines. People who played it loved it and for several years I ran weekend competitions to see who could score the most points in the game. However it would not work once Windows became the PC operating system. I needed to rewrite it for the look and feel of a Windows program but couldn't build the enthusiasm to do so. The game files languished on my computer and a DVD back up disk awaiting the day I would come back and look at it again. It would be almost thirty years before that day came round.
In 2022 I moved the PC the game files were on from the UK to Malaysia and readied myself to look at it again. I bought a new Windows PC and was about a week or two away from transferring all the files from the old PC to the new one when the hard drive failed. The drive was 20 years old but it still came as a shock when it failed to start up. What was more of a shock to me was to find that whilst I had back up copies of all the other drives in that PC this particular drive appeared to have none. I sent it off to data recovery experts but to no avail, it was irreparably damaged. Whilst they were looking at it I went back in the UK to bring over the last of my belongings, trying not to include items that would be of no use. I found a plastic box containing back up DVDs and looked at the top few. These were of photographs whose negatives were safely overseas so I decided to throw them all away. Once back in Malaysia I realised that the pile of DVDs included those for the back up of the failed drive and one specifically for the computer game. I appeared to have lost everything, the game program had gone forever and I wasn't going to be able to rewrite it. The original had taken me five years to complete and I knew it would take a similar time to start from scratch. There was only one thing I had left now and that was to pray for a miracle.
I was praying for there to be a second DVD, stored separately from the back up CDs I had thrown away or maybe for the game files to be found on one of the other drives in the old PC but after several weeks neither came to pass. Then a thought came to mind, what if someone else still had a copy of the game on their PC? Now remember my game had not been playable for over 25 years and I had lost touch with all those who I had a copy of it except for one man. I had given him a floppy disc (anyone remember them?) of the game and he had completely rewritten it to run on Windows PCs but using data for a different year. It was a long shot, he might still have that floppy disc but goodness knows whether any data files on it would still be readable (and of course I no longer had a floppy disc reader). We hadn't spoken for over twenty years so after several more days of prayers I finally built up courage, composed a short email and sent it to him.
The answer was positive! Files from my game still existed on his machine but had been modified years ago. Those files were emailed to me and I stored them on my PC (and a memory stick!) Once I started to look at them I realised there was still a problem, some weren't readable because they had been converted to run using a different language to the one I had. I didn't give up and vaguely remembering what I had originally written enabled me to decipher and rebuild all the data files. The program itself still has to be written but I'm working on that but without the data files I would never have started.
Now some of you may be wondering why I have written this story. I believe in the power of prayer and my blog includes many stories where something that was really important to me at that time comes to pass, despite the unlikelihood of that happening. It may be difficult to appreciate just how much getting these files back means to me but my Father knew. It may be difficult for you to appreciate how unlikely it would be that my original files would have survived on my friend's multiple generations of new PCs but my Father knew that one day I would want them. The prayers I (and others made on my behalf) were answered.
In 2022 I moved the PC the game files were on from the UK to Malaysia and readied myself to look at it again. I bought a new Windows PC and was about a week or two away from transferring all the files from the old PC to the new one when the hard drive failed. The drive was 20 years old but it still came as a shock when it failed to start up. What was more of a shock to me was to find that whilst I had back up copies of all the other drives in that PC this particular drive appeared to have none. I sent it off to data recovery experts but to no avail, it was irreparably damaged. Whilst they were looking at it I went back in the UK to bring over the last of my belongings, trying not to include items that would be of no use. I found a plastic box containing back up DVDs and looked at the top few. These were of photographs whose negatives were safely overseas so I decided to throw them all away. Once back in Malaysia I realised that the pile of DVDs included those for the back up of the failed drive and one specifically for the computer game. I appeared to have lost everything, the game program had gone forever and I wasn't going to be able to rewrite it. The original had taken me five years to complete and I knew it would take a similar time to start from scratch. There was only one thing I had left now and that was to pray for a miracle.
I was praying for there to be a second DVD, stored separately from the back up CDs I had thrown away or maybe for the game files to be found on one of the other drives in the old PC but after several weeks neither came to pass. Then a thought came to mind, what if someone else still had a copy of the game on their PC? Now remember my game had not been playable for over 25 years and I had lost touch with all those who I had a copy of it except for one man. I had given him a floppy disc (anyone remember them?) of the game and he had completely rewritten it to run on Windows PCs but using data for a different year. It was a long shot, he might still have that floppy disc but goodness knows whether any data files on it would still be readable (and of course I no longer had a floppy disc reader). We hadn't spoken for over twenty years so after several more days of prayers I finally built up courage, composed a short email and sent it to him.
The answer was positive! Files from my game still existed on his machine but had been modified years ago. Those files were emailed to me and I stored them on my PC (and a memory stick!) Once I started to look at them I realised there was still a problem, some weren't readable because they had been converted to run using a different language to the one I had. I didn't give up and vaguely remembering what I had originally written enabled me to decipher and rebuild all the data files. The program itself still has to be written but I'm working on that but without the data files I would never have started.
Now some of you may be wondering why I have written this story. I believe in the power of prayer and my blog includes many stories where something that was really important to me at that time comes to pass, despite the unlikelihood of that happening. It may be difficult to appreciate just how much getting these files back means to me but my Father knew. It may be difficult for you to appreciate how unlikely it would be that my original files would have survived on my friend's multiple generations of new PCs but my Father knew that one day I would want them. The prayers I (and others made on my behalf) were answered.