FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller(deviceside.com) |
FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller(deviceside.com) |
Fluxengine (multi-format): http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/
Arduino-based : http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/
USB meant specifically for Amiga floppies: https://github.com/jtsiomb/usbamigafloppy
DiskIO. IDE+Floppy for ECB bus: https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:ecb:di...
xt-fdc. Floppy controller for ISA bus: https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:isa:xt...
zfdcv1. Floppy controller for S100 bus: https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:s100:z...
I've built this - it works really well. Both reading and writing Amiga disks.
The stay-at-home order in our area is "until further notice" with no expiration date. We can't provide an estimated ship date.
My main complaint was that it doesn't sound like a disk drive (Apple drives had a very distinctive sound), but the creator also has a device that makes that sound if you want.
My second complaint was that it's slightly slower than an actual disk drive (however, since my disk drives keep breaking/corrupting files, I can live with this).
Finally, it seems to corrupt some of the data on transport (or somehow work differently than an actual floppy), so some programs crash or fail in a different way.
That said I continue to think it's hilarious that the disk drive for my Apple has a far more powerful processor and more storage space than an Apple IIe ever did, and I just use it to act like a fake disk drive.
I'm really impressed w/ the FloppyEmu. The creator added WOZ disk image support fairly recently and I threw him some extra cash when I downloaded the new firmware, to show my appreciation for his continued development on the device.
I would prefer a device that supported network storage, so I could just point it at my server which has thousands of disk images.
http://electronicstechnician.tpub.com/14091/css/The-5-25-Inc...
This page discusses a hardware modification that can be done to allow two TEAC-55GFR drives to work together, where one is loaded with an unflipped disk and supplies the required index signal to the other drive:
The sleeves are usually contact welded shut on the sides, so if one wants to keep the discs working, one of the edges can be undone and the disc can be removed like a letter from an envelope. "Transplants" are also possible.
This method supports more or less any platform, and images can be made with copy protection in place (for emulators that support it), or copies to new disk media preserving the original copy protection.
In 2019 a lot of people migrated to FluxEngine [2]. Though there are plenty of alternatives [3].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/buyj9f/co...
[2] http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html
[3] https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_...
I don't think there would be a legal basis here. If I sell a pen, I can't claim ownership of the things people write with it, no matter what EULA I make people sign. The same holds for a Xerox machine. And similarly it holds for a tool to copy bits or flux transitions.
That's baloney. The whole idea of a 'flippy disk' was to be able to read the second side of a single-sided disk. To make a flippy-disk you merely had to make an index hole in the correct position of the floppy's envelope and a write-enable notch in the correction position of the envelope also.
I made a cardboard template to mark those positions and used a hole-punch of this kind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_punch
to make the holes themselves. Note that for the index hole, you had to carefully punch a hole in the envelope only, not the actual magnetic media itself.
If you put a flippy disk into a double-sided drive which is expecting to read double-sided disks, you're going to have a bad day. The data on the back side of a flippy disk is written backwards compared to how it would be written on the back side by a double-sided floppy drive.
To read the second side of flippy-floppies that you already have, you use the single-sided software that wrote the disk and that only uses a single side of the floppy and flip the floppy over. Then you transfer the data to a normal double-sided floppy.
I've looked for a VHS-to-digital converter, but couldn't find any. The only seeming solution is getting a TV tuner card, plugging an old VHS player to it, and actually playing the VHS on it, and using TV Tuner software to record it.
So this interface probably works for both.
I swapped out a 5.25" drive on a BBC Micro for a modern 3.5" drive and even got it to work using HD media (the BBC used SD).
There's also scsi 3.5" drives out there. Some ThinkPads had them. In fact, those drives were 2.88MB, just like on the NeXT, the 1.44 was common but one of a large number of capacities in that form factor...
If you do this, use dd, not cat. Why? dd has this
noerror continue after read errors
You're going to get errors. Lots of errors! However, 80% or so of the time, most of the disk is still recoverable, but only if you use the right tools.
It's going to be slow, real slow. A few minutes a disk with errors.
Now that I think of it, you can probably swap the NeXT and thinkpad drives with a little effort. I bet there's a good arbitrage on eBay here if I'm right.
There's systems that go the other way, sd card/usb disk to fake floppy but what I really want is usb to fake floppy. In this model the usb exposes itself as a configurable given capacity drive on both ends of the pipe, fake on both ends
At the modern computer I copy over the files to the fake drive disk by disk and on the old computer I tap enter accordingly. Then someone can do a 20 disk install or whatever without a bunch of effort. It's not a hard device to make but i checked and i still don't see it
Note that the data orientation will be different on the bottom of a single sided disk written with the disk upside down than if written on a double sided drive.
It's different than a USB floppy disk drive, which is more like a weird integrated ATAPI device on a USB-ATAPI bridge
I'm speaking from experience with ZIP drives, including the internal ATAPI and IDE versions. Support for Linux was dropped a while ago, but you can load that in as a Kernel module. I still haven't gotten that to work.
Current Win10 install kinda works, but the best success I've had is with an old 32-bit installation of WinXP. Even then, doing the things you'd like to do with a floppy drive (reading reliably, reading when inserted, decoupling the unmount/eject ((as opposed to the old way Mac handled it))) mechanism is difficult. Also, some USB->ATAPI bridges simply don't work with ATAPI floppy devices.
If you've ever wanted to solve a problem that no one else has attempted (because no one cares, at all) there's a project for you.
Is grossly insufficient, unfortunately. It has minimal functionality.
There's a lot of floppy drive types and custom floppy formats to deal with.
Not for the last 10 years. Even though the cable fits, the BIOS does not recognize it.
I've read online that even USB floppy drives are no longer supported in macOS. Which is disappointing.
But my main workstation doesn't. The primary reason is the motherboard lacks a floppy controller.
And most dvd-recorders have better comb filters and time base correction than most other things that have composite inputs, and especially the ones with a vhs player built in. They know they have to clean up a vhs's signal.
So if you're going to use home equipment, that is an easy way to get better than average input stage for analog video and vhs in particular which needs tbc as well as merely adc.
Capture cards actually usually have pretty crap composite input, even ones that don't even have any other input!
But if I cared about the capture at all I'd use a professional media service.
Capturing anything analog, especially for a one-last-time-then-live-with-the-result-for-the-rest-of-time... is ALL about the quality of the initial analog read, and that is the kind of thing where it gets better the more you spend, and tv stations and professional shops have $50,000 machines and the people to operate them that you just are not going to match.
But it can't just be anyone with an ad in the phone book that says we convert vhs tapes. Many of those are nothing but a dude no better equipped in either hardware or wetware than yourself.
There was someone doing custom interface to read very old HDD (mfm old), dont remember the exact website.
Here is this DVD hack https://debugmo.de/2007/07/read-your-dvds-the-raw-way/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7olNiMCz9to showed how easy it is to do it for CDs.
There are also CD emulators injecting signal directly into laser lens interface https://shop.terraonion.com/en/home/17-Terraonion_MODE_Dream....
Though it's been well over a decade since I've touched/used anything like this. I do have a friend that does some conversions as a business... he uses pro grade svhs player and it's slightly better quality, but far from ideal.
Similar for old super-8 videos, mostly comes down to playing and recording via webcam in a controlled environment. If you go completely black, the recording washes out, so want some light in the playback/recording, and then runs through some filters.
For any video format, you're spot-on -- using S-Video instead of composite does wonders for the quality, although if it was recorded from a composite source, you won't squeeze blood from a stone. There are plenty of capture cards with Y/C inputs, and modern PCs are fast enough to keep up with even the pathetically buffer-starved models.
You may be able to do this using a Wi-Fi enabled SD card with a floppy emulator.
With both drives there was a brief moment the the zip disk showed up, once. Then never again.
I eventually just purchased a PCIe IDE controller card and that works as expected.
It's wild when I hear/read about production systems still running with old floppy media.
The notch could be done to trick single-sided drives into letting you flip the disk over, which is probably what I was thinking of, but TFA says most drives can't read those with this controller.
According to wikipedia 40 track diskettes could be read by most 80 track drives, but once it was written to by an 80 track drive it was typically no longer readable by a 40 track drive.
Soon he decided we needed a 3.5 inch floppy drive as well. But he didn't want to give up having both the 1.2MB and 360KB 5.25 inch drives. The existing floppy controller only supported 2 floppy drives, so he went and bought a new one which supported four floppy drives. The chassis had enough drive bays to fit all three floppies and a 40MB hard disk. We had to make some changes to CONFIG.SYS (maybe an installable device driver??) since BIOS/DOS couldn't detect more than 2 floppy drives by default.
And I could use one... I actually do use floppies still.
That machine has all my floppy, cdrom, and internal Zip drives in it right now. I could stand to upgrade it to SSD though; the old 120GB is getting noisy and I suspect the bearings are shot.
I do actually wonder if there's any sort of EFI support for floppies.
Edit: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/f1...
What a mess. Likely just works on netbsd, but I hate this sort of thing.
But at least, there is hope that fully OSS+OSHW solutions will effectively replace it.
What they're doing is certainly not magic. Warpers existed in the 90s already.
All that matters is that they tried.