9 ms·

FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

139 points by zaxcellent 6y ago

exhilaration 6y ago
Pricing is here for the curious: http://shop.deviceside.com/ http://shop.deviceside.com/
forinti 6y ago
AFAIK, the cables were identical in 3.5" and 5.25" drives. 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).
- kristopolous 6y ago
  They were. The connectors at the end of the drives were different and that was all (adapters were common, probably still available) 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
  - NegativeLatency 6y ago
    Theres some open source firmware available for these I believe that makes them work with more computers: http://www.gotekemulator.com http://www.gotekemulator.com Found it: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki
  - pronoiac 6y ago
    You might check out the gnu ddrescue; it can use logs and allow repeated attempts with resuming.
- deviceside 6y ago
  The physical track format is different between 3.5" and 5.25" drives. Our product is intended for use with 5.25" drives only. Please do not purchase our product for use reading 3.5" disks. USB 3.5" floppy drives were commercially available from TEAC and Y-E DATA.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Isn't there an USB FDD standard? Why are they using a proprietary protocol instead of that?
- aidenn0 6y ago
  I suspect the USB FDD standard does not support telling the device what type of disk is inserted. This supports far more than the IBM compatible disks that can be determined just from the notches.
  - Girlang 6y ago
    The notches on 5.25 don’t identify capacity
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      Wow you're right, that was 3.5" only. 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.
      - skissane 6y ago
        I remember our first computer (a 386SX16/20) which my Dad bought sometime around 1989/1990, started out with two 5.25 inch floppy drives – a 1.2MB drive and a 360KB drive, so we could write 360KB disks without corrupting them. (My Dad thought this was important, I guess it was somewhat back then.) 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.
devonstopps 6y ago
Interesting device. would be great if this supported odd formats like this one does: https://www.vesalia.de/e_catweaselmk4.htm https://www.vesalia.de/e_catweaselmk4.htm
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Did. That product, and its successor, are discontinued.
reaperducer 6y ago
I see that it's been tested up to MacOS Sierra. I wonder if this could be used on Catalina. I've read online that even USB floppy drives are no longer supported in macOS. Which is disappointing.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Regardless of the support of standard USB floppy drives this one wouldn’t work anyway because it uses a custom protocol.
- deviceside 6y ago
  It can be used up to Mojave. The current drivers don't work on Catalina. We hope to release an update soon, but there is no ETA.
ac29 6y ago
As far as I know the state of the art is reading and writing the raw magnetic flux to/from a disk with something like this: http://softpres.org/glossary:kryoflux http://softpres.org/glossary:kryoflux 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.
- paulgerhardt 6y ago
  Kryoflux was the state of the art in 2013 (and is pretty capable for non C64 disks) but their shady legal practices asserting copyright of ripped images[1] makes their images blacklisted by the Internet Archive. 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/comment/epjwsut https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/buyj9f/co... [2] http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html [3] https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_Disks https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_...
  - amelius 6y ago
    > asserting copyright of ripped images 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.
    - paulgerhardt 6y ago
      Not quite. As I understand it, the hardware rips disks and encodes them in proprietary SPS flux image formats (.IPF, .STREAM, and .DRAFT) subject to a very weird license agreement.[1] SPS does not assert ownership of the encoded content but does assert that content encoded with their software can not be used for commercial purposes. I suspect this “bit coloring” is at the root of why the Internet Archive made the decision to no longer accept Kryoflux based images and why it is not a good candidate for archival purposes. [1] https://www.kryoflux.com/download/LICENCE.txt https://www.kryoflux.com/download/LICENCE.txt
davestephens 6y ago
I don't need one, but I want one. Knowing my dad he still has all of the software from our Amstrad 1640 stashed in the garage!
mikepurvis 6y ago
For anyone else curious about the index hole thing, there's a diagram here: http://electronicstechnician.tpub.com/14091/css/The-5-25-Inch-Floppy-Disk-Construction-261.htm 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: http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/FLIPPY.htm http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/FLIPPY.htm
snvzz 6y ago
There's been a lot of open hardware floppy controller projects lately. Here's some I know. Fluxengine (multi-format): http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/ http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/ Arduino-based : http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ USB meant specifically for Amiga floppies: https://github.com/jtsiomb/usbamigafloppy https://github.com/jtsiomb/usbamigafloppy DiskIO. IDE+Floppy for ECB bus: https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:ecb:diskio-v3:start 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-fdc:start 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:zfdcv1:start https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:s100:z...
- Gracana 6y ago
  A fairly recent one: https://applesaucefdc.com/ https://applesaucefdc.com/
- Jaruzel 6y ago
  > Arduino-based : http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ I've built this - it works really well. Both reading and writing Amiga disks.
- raginalix 6y ago
  I have built a Flux engine adapter and managed to get good dumps with it. It is easy to build and cheap. Gets a +1 from me.
- th0ma5 6y ago
  pi based c64 drive https://hackaday.com/2018/05/07/raspberry-pi-becomes-cycle-exact-commodore-drive-emulator/ https://hackaday.com/2018/05/07/raspberry-pi-becomes-cycle-e...
- Chol 6y ago
  You forgot https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle
bluedino 6y ago
If you want to reminisce about old floppy drives, and the other floppy formats that never made it, the 8-bit guy did a good video on old storage mediums: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvXXkB2jic0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvXXkB2jic0
- Jaruzel 6y ago
  ...and destroyed some perfectly good floppy media while he was at it! Grrr
  - rzzzt 6y ago
    crunch 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 6y ago
I always wondered why PCs maintained support for 3.5" disks, but not for 5.25". Fortunately, beforehand I had presciently copied my hundreds of floppies to CD-ROMs. But I still keep finding more :-)
- duxup 6y ago
  I always assumed the support was because for a long time PCs would boot from 3.5 disks but not CD-Roms and the 3.5 disks were pretty easy to take to another computer, format correctly, and then boot from if needed to load a new OS or recover from a hard disk issue.
- toast0 6y ago
  PCs still support for 5.25" discs, but the 3.5" disks are better (smaller, more durable, more data per disk, unless you're comparing 5.25" high density vs 3.5" double density. By the 90s, cd-rom was clearly the future, but a boot disk came in handy, so one floppy drive was enough for most people. 3.5" disks also had the 2.88 drives, and LS-120 drives with compatible form factors.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    > PCs still support for 5.25" discs Not for the last 10 years. Even though the cable fits, the BIOS does not recognize it.
    - snvzz 6y ago
      I haven't seen any motherboard with FDC for over a decade. And I could use one... I actually do use floppies still.
      - myself248 6y ago
        Guess I'll be keeping my socket AM2+ board around indefinitely, then! I just tossed a Phenom into it to buy it some relevance as the AthlonX2 which it held for the last decade was feeling a bit old, but I'm considering going back just for thermal reasons -- my god, Phenoms run hot. 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.
renewiltord 6y ago
I think I encountered 5¼" floppies only near the beginning of my computing life so I only had a couple at the school lab but this is the first I've heard of flippy disks. What a clever name! If most PC drives couldn't read these, which manufacturer drives did people use?
- royjacobs 6y ago
  Some Commodore drives (like the 1541) were single sided so you'd have to use the floppy disk approach.
- core-questions 6y ago
  I remember being prompted to flip over the disk on an Apple //e clone from a company called Datatrain we had back in the 80s.
- toast0 6y ago
  IBM pcs generally had double-sided drives. No need to flip, because the drive had heads for the top and bottom. Other computers varied, usually depending on when they introduced floppy drives (double sided is more complex, but better experience). 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.
dekhn 6y ago
I'm currently using a Floppy Emu on my Apple IIe- it maps disk files on an SD card to the Apple controller's wire protocol. 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.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  I'm using a FloppyEmu model B on a IIgs. I haven't used it extensively for writing, but I did find that Bank Street Writer II will not format or write to a DSK image properly. 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.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    It's really quite amazing what a hobbyist can make these days (and sell on the internet). I would prefer a device that supported network storage, so I could just point it at my server which has thousands of disk images.
    - bdowling 6y ago
      > I would prefer a device that supported network storage You may be able to do this using a Wi-Fi enabled SD card with a floppy emulator.
zaxcellent 6y ago
When I found this sight, I was uncertain if one could still buy this device or if the owner was even still active, but then I checked the front page: "March, 2020: Orders may be delayed due to the COVID-19 situation. Thank you for your patience and understanding." The previous news post was from 2017. I think the owner's commitment to this project is amazing. I think that that the owner had to explicitly call out delays due to COVID-19 is also noteworthy.
winter_blue 6y ago
Is there a similar VHS reader anywhere? 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.
- tracker1 6y ago
  I don't know that there are any VHS devices that go straight to digital... Mostly it does come down to capture cards... if you can, use an SVHS Stereo of higher quality for the player, and svhs input... you'll get slightly higher quality. 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.
  - myself248 6y ago
    For film transfer, you should at least be setting manual exposure control on the camera. But realistically, matching the film frame-advance rate precisely to the camera shutter rate will be all sorts of tricky, and you should either have proper synchronization, or do it a frame at a time and then capture the audio separately. 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.
- rasz 6y ago
  LaserDisc preservation by capturing raw rf signal might be closest to what you want https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978 https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978 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://debugmo.de/2007/07/read-your-dvds-the-raw-way/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7olNiMCz9to 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_Dreamcast_Saturn_ODE.html https://shop.terraonion.com/en/home/17-Terraonion_MODE_Dream....
simonblack 6y ago
Most PC-style drives can't read the second side of "flippy" disks 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 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.
- ansible 6y ago
  Making a flippy disk was to use the back side of a floppy when you only had a single-sided drive (like I did back in the day). 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.
  - th0ma5 6y ago
    this is the right answer. i had to buy a 1541 c64 disk drive to read the back of my c64 disks
  - simonblack 6y ago
    If you already have a double-sided floppy drive, then you don't have any reason to make flippy-floppies to use that second side of the floppy. 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.
rkagerer 6y ago
The computer I use today still has 3.5" floppy drive.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- snvzz 6y ago
  Many of my computers which I still use do. But my main workstation doesn't. The primary reason is the motherboard lacks a floppy controller.
deviceside 6y ago
Thanks for all the interest. Our shipping operations are temporarily stopped due to COVID-19 so please do not order if you expect to receive your order promptly! The stay-at-home order in our area is "until further notice" with no expiration date. We can't provide an estimated ship date.
floppy123 6y ago
Is there any 5.25 or 3.5 floppy drive hardware remake project out there for reading/writing floppies without using ancient hardware?
dschuetz 6y ago
The limitations of this one are pretty crippling. It hardly counts as a controller, it's just a USB floppy reader. Even the software has some absurd limitations.
sawyatiaye 6y ago
ok

139 points by zaxcellent 6y ago

Pricing is here for the curious: http://shop.deviceside.com/ http://shop.deviceside.com/

AFAIK, the cables were identical in 3.5" and 5.25" drives. 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).

kristopolous 6y ago
They were. The connectors at the end of the drives were different and that was all (adapters were common, probably still available) 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
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  Theres some open source firmware available for these I believe that makes them work with more computers: http://www.gotekemulator.com http://www.gotekemulator.com Found it: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki
- pronoiac 6y ago
  You might check out the gnu ddrescue; it can use logs and allow repeated attempts with resuming.
deviceside 6y ago
The physical track format is different between 3.5" and 5.25" drives. Our product is intended for use with 5.25" drives only. Please do not purchase our product for use reading 3.5" disks. USB 3.5" floppy drives were commercially available from TEAC and Y-E DATA.

Nextgrid 6y ago

Isn't there an USB FDD standard? Why are they using a proprietary protocol instead of that?

aidenn0 6y ago
I suspect the USB FDD standard does not support telling the device what type of disk is inserted. This supports far more than the IBM compatible disks that can be determined just from the notches.
- Girlang 6y ago
  The notches on 5.25 don’t identify capacity
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    Wow you're right, that was 3.5" only. 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.
    - skissane 6y ago
      I remember our first computer (a 386SX16/20) which my Dad bought sometime around 1989/1990, started out with two 5.25 inch floppy drives – a 1.2MB drive and a 360KB drive, so we could write 360KB disks without corrupting them. (My Dad thought this was important, I guess it was somewhat back then.) 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.

devonstopps 6y ago

Interesting device. would be great if this supported odd formats like this one does: https://www.vesalia.de/e_catweaselmk4.htm https://www.vesalia.de/e_catweaselmk4.htm

reaperducer 6y ago
Did. That product, and its successor, are discontinued.

reaperducer 6y ago

I see that it's been tested up to MacOS Sierra. I wonder if this could be used on Catalina. I've read online that even USB floppy drives are no longer supported in macOS. Which is disappointing.

Nextgrid 6y ago
Regardless of the support of standard USB floppy drives this one wouldn’t work anyway because it uses a custom protocol.
deviceside 6y ago
It can be used up to Mojave. The current drivers don't work on Catalina. We hope to release an update soon, but there is no ETA.

ac29 6y ago

As far as I know the state of the art is reading and writing the raw magnetic flux to/from a disk with something like this: http://softpres.org/glossary:kryoflux http://softpres.org/glossary:kryoflux 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.

paulgerhardt 6y ago
Kryoflux was the state of the art in 2013 (and is pretty capable for non C64 disks) but their shady legal practices asserting copyright of ripped images[1] makes their images blacklisted by the Internet Archive. 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/comment/epjwsut https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/buyj9f/co... [2] http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html [3] https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_Disks https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_...
- amelius 6y ago
  > asserting copyright of ripped images 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.
  - paulgerhardt 6y ago
    Not quite. As I understand it, the hardware rips disks and encodes them in proprietary SPS flux image formats (.IPF, .STREAM, and .DRAFT) subject to a very weird license agreement.[1] SPS does not assert ownership of the encoded content but does assert that content encoded with their software can not be used for commercial purposes. I suspect this “bit coloring” is at the root of why the Internet Archive made the decision to no longer accept Kryoflux based images and why it is not a good candidate for archival purposes. [1] https://www.kryoflux.com/download/LICENCE.txt https://www.kryoflux.com/download/LICENCE.txt

davestephens 6y ago

I don't need one, but I want one. Knowing my dad he still has all of the software from our Amstrad 1640 stashed in the garage!

mikepurvis 6y ago

For anyone else curious about the index hole thing, there's a diagram here: http://electronicstechnician.tpub.com/14091/css/The-5-25-Inch-Floppy-Disk-Construction-261.htm 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: http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/FLIPPY.htm http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/FLIPPY.htm

snvzz 6y ago

There's been a lot of open hardware floppy controller projects lately. Here's some I know. Fluxengine (multi-format): http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/ http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/ Arduino-based : http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ USB meant specifically for Amiga floppies: https://github.com/jtsiomb/usbamigafloppy https://github.com/jtsiomb/usbamigafloppy DiskIO. IDE+Floppy for ECB bus: https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:ecb:diskio-v3:start 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-fdc:start 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:zfdcv1:start https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:s100:z...

Gracana 6y ago
A fairly recent one: https://applesaucefdc.com/ https://applesaucefdc.com/
Jaruzel 6y ago
> Arduino-based : http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ I've built this - it works really well. Both reading and writing Amiga disks.
raginalix 6y ago
I have built a Flux engine adapter and managed to get good dumps with it. It is easy to build and cheap. Gets a +1 from me.
th0ma5 6y ago
pi based c64 drive https://hackaday.com/2018/05/07/raspberry-pi-becomes-cycle-exact-commodore-drive-emulator/ https://hackaday.com/2018/05/07/raspberry-pi-becomes-cycle-e...
Chol 6y ago
You forgot https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle

bluedino 6y ago

If you want to reminisce about old floppy drives, and the other floppy formats that never made it, the 8-bit guy did a good video on old storage mediums: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvXXkB2jic0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvXXkB2jic0

Jaruzel 6y ago
...and destroyed some perfectly good floppy media while he was at it! Grrr
- rzzzt 6y ago
  crunch 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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

WalterBright 6y ago

I always wondered why PCs maintained support for 3.5" disks, but not for 5.25". Fortunately, beforehand I had presciently copied my hundreds of floppies to CD-ROMs. But I still keep finding more :-)

duxup 6y ago
I always assumed the support was because for a long time PCs would boot from 3.5 disks but not CD-Roms and the 3.5 disks were pretty easy to take to another computer, format correctly, and then boot from if needed to load a new OS or recover from a hard disk issue.
toast0 6y ago
PCs still support for 5.25" discs, but the 3.5" disks are better (smaller, more durable, more data per disk, unless you're comparing 5.25" high density vs 3.5" double density. By the 90s, cd-rom was clearly the future, but a boot disk came in handy, so one floppy drive was enough for most people. 3.5" disks also had the 2.88 drives, and LS-120 drives with compatible form factors.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > PCs still support for 5.25" discs Not for the last 10 years. Even though the cable fits, the BIOS does not recognize it.
  - snvzz 6y ago
    I haven't seen any motherboard with FDC for over a decade. And I could use one... I actually do use floppies still.
    - myself248 6y ago
      Guess I'll be keeping my socket AM2+ board around indefinitely, then! I just tossed a Phenom into it to buy it some relevance as the AthlonX2 which it held for the last decade was feeling a bit old, but I'm considering going back just for thermal reasons -- my god, Phenoms run hot. 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.

renewiltord 6y ago

I think I encountered 5¼" floppies only near the beginning of my computing life so I only had a couple at the school lab but this is the first I've heard of flippy disks. What a clever name! If most PC drives couldn't read these, which manufacturer drives did people use?

royjacobs 6y ago
Some Commodore drives (like the 1541) were single sided so you'd have to use the floppy disk approach.
core-questions 6y ago
I remember being prompted to flip over the disk on an Apple //e clone from a company called Datatrain we had back in the 80s.
toast0 6y ago
IBM pcs generally had double-sided drives. No need to flip, because the drive had heads for the top and bottom. Other computers varied, usually depending on when they introduced floppy drives (double sided is more complex, but better experience). 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.

dekhn 6y ago

I'm currently using a Floppy Emu on my Apple IIe- it maps disk files on an SD card to the Apple controller's wire protocol. 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.

EvanAnderson 6y ago
I'm using a FloppyEmu model B on a IIgs. I haven't used it extensively for writing, but I did find that Bank Street Writer II will not format or write to a DSK image properly. 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.
- dekhn 6y ago
  It's really quite amazing what a hobbyist can make these days (and sell on the internet). I would prefer a device that supported network storage, so I could just point it at my server which has thousands of disk images.
  - bdowling 6y ago
    > I would prefer a device that supported network storage You may be able to do this using a Wi-Fi enabled SD card with a floppy emulator.

zaxcellent 6y ago

When I found this sight, I was uncertain if one could still buy this device or if the owner was even still active, but then I checked the front page: "March, 2020: Orders may be delayed due to the COVID-19 situation. Thank you for your patience and understanding." The previous news post was from 2017. I think the owner's commitment to this project is amazing. I think that that the owner had to explicitly call out delays due to COVID-19 is also noteworthy.

winter_blue 6y ago

Is there a similar VHS reader anywhere? 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.

tracker1 6y ago
I don't know that there are any VHS devices that go straight to digital... Mostly it does come down to capture cards... if you can, use an SVHS Stereo of higher quality for the player, and svhs input... you'll get slightly higher quality. 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.
- myself248 6y ago
  For film transfer, you should at least be setting manual exposure control on the camera. But realistically, matching the film frame-advance rate precisely to the camera shutter rate will be all sorts of tricky, and you should either have proper synchronization, or do it a frame at a time and then capture the audio separately. 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.
rasz 6y ago
LaserDisc preservation by capturing raw rf signal might be closest to what you want https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978 https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978 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://debugmo.de/2007/07/read-your-dvds-the-raw-way/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7olNiMCz9to 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_Dreamcast_Saturn_ODE.html https://shop.terraonion.com/en/home/17-Terraonion_MODE_Dream....

simonblack 6y ago

Most PC-style drives can't read the second side of "flippy" disks 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 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.

ansible 6y ago
Making a flippy disk was to use the back side of a floppy when you only had a single-sided drive (like I did back in the day). 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.
- th0ma5 6y ago
  this is the right answer. i had to buy a 1541 c64 disk drive to read the back of my c64 disks
- simonblack 6y ago
  If you already have a double-sided floppy drive, then you don't have any reason to make flippy-floppies to use that second side of the floppy. 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.

rkagerer 6y ago

The computer I use today still has 3.5" floppy drive.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
snvzz 6y ago
Many of my computers which I still use do. But my main workstation doesn't. The primary reason is the motherboard lacks a floppy controller.

deviceside 6y ago

Thanks for all the interest. Our shipping operations are temporarily stopped due to COVID-19 so please do not order if you expect to receive your order promptly! The stay-at-home order in our area is "until further notice" with no expiration date. We can't provide an estimated ship date.

floppy123 6y ago

Is there any 5.25 or 3.5 floppy drive hardware remake project out there for reading/writing floppies without using ancient hardware?

dschuetz 6y ago

The limitations of this one are pretty crippling. It hardly counts as a controller, it's just a USB floppy reader. Even the software has some absurd limitations.

sawyatiaye 6y ago