Is there any 5.25 or 3.5 floppy drive hardware remake project out there for reading/writing floppies without using ancient hardware?
FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller
61–70 of 80 posts
Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller
#62The 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.
Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller
#63There'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…
pi based c64 drive https://hackaday.com/2018/05/07/raspberry-pi-becomes-cycle-e...
Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller
#64Most 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 use…
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.
this is the right answer. i had to buy a 1541 c64 disk drive to read the back of my c64 disks
Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller
#65There'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…
You forgot https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle
Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller
#66There'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…
You forgot https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle
I didn't forget. I hadn't heard of it. Thanks for letting me know about it.
Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> PCs still support for 5.25" discs Not for the last 10 years. Even though the cable fits, the BIOS does not recognize it.
I haven't seen any motherboard with FDC for over a decade.
And I could use one... I actually do use floppies still.
Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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 dec…
It's a shame they're doing this.
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.
Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> PCs still support for 5.25" discs Not for the last 10 years. Even though the cable fits, the BIOS does not recognize it.
I haven't seen any motherboard with FDC for over a decade. And I could use one... I actually do use floppies still.
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.
Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller
#70Is 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.
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…
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.