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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

What a fun project.

The question is, will it read copy-protected floppies so you can run Lotus 1-2-3? :)

related, they make USB floppy disk drives, like https://amzn.com/B00RXEWOAA

USB floppy disk drives are only any good at reading and writing 1.44mb disks. If you need a 720k disk for something like an Amiga/Atari ST they don't work IME (some people have claimed otherwise but I've never had any luck).

I keep an old Core Quad machine with a real floppy disk controller on it just for this reason. Windows XP / XP 64 and Linux are the only things that write to these drives properly (IIRC Windows versions after Vista don't control the floppy controller directly). I do have better options now for transferring files to these old machines.

https://www.amazon.it/gp/aw/d/B01J1RAHYQ/ref=ppx_yo_mob_b_in...

I bought that a couple of years ago, it supports both dd and hd floppies.

The capacity isn't the problem. It is the direct write access. If it is USB it tends not to have direct hardware access and it won't work no PC format disk e.g. the ADF Amiga format.

If I use a real floppy disk controller + Linux can write to those disks in the correct format. It works. I am not an expert in how any of this works though. What I have at the moment is sufficient.

I am sure people have had luck with USB drives. I have not.

Amiga disks can't be read by PC floppy controllers whether they're USB or not (barring the 2 drive hack seen here before) because they write a whole track at once and pc floppy controllers can't be programmed to understand their sector headers.

If you want to read/write Amiga disks with a PC you need a greaseweasel or a Kryoflux

Just tried it. It appears I am using cross-dos. I've still never had any luck with USB drives though (just tried a USB floppy I have as well).

from experience, most of those are really not that great, they tend to have a lot of problem reading disk and often refuse to even acknowledge the presence of a disk that my other devices (i keep a couple of old computer around for this purpose) read fine, and they don't always support lower density disk. I highly recommend ibm usb disk drive, they work much more reliably and you can find them for very reasonably price (i bought 10 of them), also they support more formats.

But if you want to read floppy from home computers (and the various format/disk layout that they use) the only solution that i found is KryoFlux or Greaseweazle.

If someone know of others "modern" floppy disk controller please share.

There's also the FluxEngine: http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/

(I use it as it has support for reading and writing 800KB Mac disks, which would otherwise require a special floppy drive that can change the rotation speed).

This right here. 2 parts and no OS.

I recently got the parts but haven't tried it yet. I have vinatge machines that otherwise need a real floppy controller and not a modern one (nothing found on any motherboards newer than 486's), or a catweasel (also no longer made) or a KryoFlux (the nuclear option and not open source).

Greaseweasel (https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle) has come along recently as an open source catweasel. (the pcb design files are there too, just buried away in a zip file in one of the wiki pages, not directly in git, so both hardware and software source is aclvailable. Follow Hardware Assembly -> F7 Lightning Plus, scroll to bottom)

But that's more complicated.

I love how the FluxEngine is really just a single off-the-shelf part. You don't even need so much as a wiring/pinout adapter pcb for the 34-pin connector. You can just solder it directly to the dev board.

As soon as they became easily available, I've bought a no name USB floppy and managed to read and store lots of stuff I still had on decades old floppies that I found at home. I could read just about everything, while many more recent CDs and DVDs I had burned years later, some containing important stuff, became unreadable after even 5 years or less. I also lost projects I burned in multiple copies on branded media and stored properly; that made me ditch completely the optical disks on all my computers since like 2006.

They unfortunately don't make USB 5¼ inch floppy drives. But maybe with this board, one could make the Pi into a bridge between USB and a 5¼ inch drive.

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