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The stay-at-home order in our area is "until further notice" with no expiration date. We can't provide an estimated ship date.
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.
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.
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:
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
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
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.
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].
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are old player models with both a vhs and a dvd writer in one box, that copy from vhs to dvd. That's a digitizer in a box.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
This acts as a controller that attaches to a conventional PC floppy disk drive (which does not have internal controller electronics like a modern hard drive).
It's different than a USB floppy disk drive, which is more like a weird integrated ATAPI device on a USB-ATAPI bridge
The standard to which you're referring, UFI, supports only 3 media types, all of which are 3.5". It is no use for 5.25" disks. The broader Mass Storage Class is also no use because the built-in OS drivers for MSC assume that the device has a single media type or the hardware can auto-detect the media type. We use a vendor-specific command set so the host can specify parameters to read a variety of formats, including non-PC formats.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] snvzz|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] Jaruzel|6 years ago|reply
I've built this - it works really well. Both reading and writing Amiga disks.
[+] [-] Chol|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gracana|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raginalix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] th0ma5|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deviceside|6 years ago|reply
The stay-at-home order in our area is "until further notice" with no expiration date. We can't provide an estimated ship date.
[+] [-] dekhn|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mikepurvis|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] bluedino|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jaruzel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ac29|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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_...
[+] [-] simonblack|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ansible|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zaxcellent|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winter_blue|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Brian_K_White|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rasz|6 years ago|reply
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....
[+] [-] tracker1|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] forinti|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] deviceside|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exhilaration|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toast0|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] core-questions|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] royjacobs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bcoates|6 years ago|reply
It's different than a USB floppy disk drive, which is more like a weird integrated ATAPI device on a USB-ATAPI bridge
[+] [-] deviceside|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snvzz|6 years ago|reply
Is grossly insufficient, unfortunately. It has minimal functionality.
There's a lot of floppy drive types and custom floppy formats to deal with.
[+] [-] aidenn0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NegativeLatency|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] devonstopps|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toast0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|6 years ago|reply
I've read online that even USB floppy drives are no longer supported in macOS. Which is disappointing.
[+] [-] deviceside|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nextgrid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dschuetz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floppy123|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davestephens|6 years ago|reply