Oddball Query Regarding a Commodore 28 & 64

Hello. I've got a bit of a screwy problem here, so I'm hoping there are some people out there with knowledge of vintage computers.

My grandfather was a pastor, and he wrote all his sermons on a Commodore 28 back in the day. He printed them out and saved them to 5.25" floppies. Long story short, only the floppies are still around today, and the printouts and computer are long since history (actually, the C28 is in a museum somewhere in Florida). So now my dad and I are trying to get at the files on these old floppies.

There are two computers in our house that have 5.25" floppy drives: a Commodore 64, and a Packard Bell "Packmate III" running MSDOS.

The Commodore 64 has a problem: it won't turn on. I flip the switch, the screen blinks, but nothing shows up even long after it's been turned on. I was told in the past that this was the result of not using the computer for several years, but I forget what the exact problem was. Something about it having to be plugged in to recharge a battery in it? I'm not quite sure.

The Packmate III works fine, but it won't read the disks. Specifically, it keeps saying the disks do not contain readable data; I'm guessing there's some kind of format problem with reading Commodore stuff in MSDOS.

So. Any ideas as to how one could get at these disks? If I got the C64 fixed, could it read whatever the C28 recorded? (I have no idea how good/bad Commodore was at backwards compatibility.) And if the C64 would access the disks, then what's wrong with the C64 and how should I fix it?

Thanks for any and all helpful suggestions.

 

I'd guess the chances of you being able to recover the data are not very good. I can't imagine a 5.25" floppy would be able to hold information for that long. Hell, I have 3.5" floppies that go bad after 5-6 months. As for the formatting, I don't know. If you can somehow get the files off of the disks, you might be able to get a C28 emulator and read them that way. ??? Good luck.