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FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

deviceside.com

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Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#21

Post by pronoiac »

kristopolous wrote: post #6
forinti wrote: post #3

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).

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 err…

You might check out the gnu ddrescue; it can use logs and allow repeated attempts with resuming.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#22

Post by Gracana »

snvzz wrote: post #18

There's been a lot of open hardware floppy controller projects lately. Here's some I know. 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: htt…

A fairly recent one: https://applesaucefdc.com/

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#23

Post by paulgerhardt »

ac29 wrote: post #9

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].

[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_...

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#26

Post by renewiltord »

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?

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#27

Post by duxup »

WalterBright wrote: post #25

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 :-)

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.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#28

Post by dekhn »

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.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#29

Post by royjacobs »

renewiltord wrote: post #26

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?

Some Commodore drives (like the 1541) were single sided so you'd have to use the floppy disk approach.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#30

Post by Jaruzel »

snvzz wrote: post #18

There's been a lot of open hardware floppy controller projects lately. Here's some I know. 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: htt…

> Arduino-based : http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/

I've built this - it works really well. Both reading and writing Amiga disks.

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