FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller • Hacker News Board

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#71

Post by snvzz » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

myself248 wrote: post #69

snvzz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I use some even older athlon K75 for this.

I do actually wonder if there's any sort of EFI support for floppies.

Edit: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/f1...

What a mess. Likely just works on netbsd, but I hate this sort of thing.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#72

Post by rasz » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

winter_blue wrote: post #36

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.

LaserDisc preservation by capturing raw rf signal might be closest to what you want 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://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....

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#73

Post by simonblack » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 10:04 PM UTC

ansible wrote: post #58

simonblack wrote: post #48

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 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.

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.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#74

Post by aidenn0 » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #60

aidenn0 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

My first computer was a decommissioned CAD machine from my dad's work. A 12.5MHz 286. It also had two 5.25" drives in that configuration, but never thought why. Eventually installed a 1.44MB drive in place of the single density drive.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#75

Post by sawyatiaye » Sun, Apr 26, 2020, 11:08 AM UTC

ok

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#76

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 26, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

paulgerhardt wrote: post #23

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.htm…

[deleted]

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#77

Post by grouber » Sun, Apr 26, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

paulgerhardt wrote: post #23

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.htm…

From what I can tell, very little of that is true. This anti-KryoFlux sentiment seems to come from one or two high profile people disliking the way the KryoFlux people do stuff. They are a company and it's not open source. I get it. Sounds like it's down mainly to bad PR more than anything.

Misinformation from some quarters is just not helpful, and reflects badly on them IMO.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#78

Post by grouber » Sun, Apr 26, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #68

paulgerhardt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect that will happen eventually too. Think this is quite different to a warper analogue copy though

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#79

Post by Brian_K_White » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 7:32 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #37

paulgerhardt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.htm…

> 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.

It doesn't matter if it's legally enforceable.

All that matters is that they tried.

Re: FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller

#80

Post by Brian_K_White » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 7:59 AM UTC

winter_blue wrote: post #36

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.

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.