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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.

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.

> 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.

For anyone else curious about the index hole thing, there's a diagram here:

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

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

...and destroyed some perfectly good floppy media while he was at it! Grrr

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.

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_...

> 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 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

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.

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

All that matters is that they tried.

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

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.

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.

this is the right answer. i had to buy a 1541 c64 disk drive to read the back of my c64 disks

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.

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 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

Theres some open source firmware available for these I believe that makes them work with more computers: http://www.gotekemulator.com

Found it: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

For anyone buying this, please keep in mind USB-ATAPI floppy drives are especially broken in nearly all modern OSes.

I'm speaking from experience with ZIP drives, including the internal ATAPI and IDE versions. Support for Linux was dropped a while ago, but you can load that in as a Kernel module. I still haven't gotten that to work.

Current Win10 install kinda works, but the best success I've had is with an old 32-bit installation of WinXP. Even then, doing the things you'd like to do with a floppy drive (reading reliably, reading when inserted, decoupling the unmount/eject ((as opposed to the old way Mac handled it))) mechanism is difficult. Also, some USB->ATAPI bridges simply don't work with ATAPI floppy devices.

If you've ever wanted to solve a problem that no one else has attempted (because no one cares, at all) there's a project for you.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions with this comment. Was just messing with an internal Zip-750 drive. I tried both SATA to IDE adapters and an internal USB to IDE adapter. I tried with two different drives using Ubuntu 20.04 and jazip.

With both drives there was a brief moment the the zip disk showed up, once. Then never again.

I eventually just purchased a PCIe IDE controller card and that works as expected.

I did get a USB floppy drive a few years ago... don't even know for sure if/where I have it as I never actually used it... got it just in case I needed to get some data off for friends/family, but that use case never presented itself... I'd moved off of all floppy media by 2001.

It's wild when I hear/read about production systems still running with old floppy media.

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.

>USB FDD

Is grossly insufficient, unfortunately. It has minimal functionality.

There's a lot of floppy drive types and custom floppy formats to deal with.

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.

The notches on 5.25 don’t identify capacity

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 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.

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.

I think this might be a better fit for archiving software?

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

Did. That product, and its successor, are discontinued.

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.

5.25" floppies were more way reliable than 3.5" in my experience. 3.5" floppy media had the problem of varying wildly in quality, and the quality of otherwise good brands had the tendency to decrease over time. I also have memories of 1.2MB HD 5.25" floppies being quite a bit faster than 3.5" floppies back in the 80s.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Regardless of the support of standard USB floppy drives this one wouldn’t work anyway because it uses a custom protocol.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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