4 ms·
I have a synth that has a built in floppy drive. I'm thinking of two options. Either sell it and get something newer, or find a drop in replacement for the flop
by axod 17y ago
I have a synth that has a built in floppy drive. I'm thinking of two options. Either sell it and get something newer, or find a drop in replacement for the floppy drive.
Does anyone know if such a thing exists? eg a device that looks exactly like a floppy drive to the host, but has maybe an SD card slot and some way to switch between virtual disks on that filesystem?
- dfox 17y agoNormal floppy drive has essentially an analog interface with almost all digital logic in FDC/on motherboard. So building something that translates it's interface to something more modern is not exactly trivial. I can imagine how to build device that stores low-level images of floppy disks, but that is probably not useful for any kind of data exchange (because there is no easy way to access these images without such device), also such images are bound to be significantly larger (i would expect 2x-3x) than usable capacity of floppy. Storing mountable images would involve relatively complex processing of floppy disk's modulation scheme and synchronization. I haven't seen anything that does this, but it is well possible that such thing exists, but it is not going to be cheap. EDIT: Few years ago I had built something like this (with large SRAM array for storage) as a demonstration of how floppy interface works. It kind of worked, but I abandoned this project before getting it to work reliably or documenting it.
- fhars 17y agoI don't, but google does. http://jimwarholic.com/2009/04/fdd-floppy-disk-drive-emulators.php http://jimwarholic.com/2009/04/fdd-floppy-disk-drive-emulato... They seem to be quite expensive, so unless you really must have a physical device with the right connector, you are better off buying a new computer.
- axod 17y agoGreat. Thanks. These look like they would do the job.