Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised nobody ever manufactured the floppy-disc equivalent of those audio-to-casette-player adapters. Making one would be a fun project...

But the real, practical answer is that there are floppy drive emulators that speak (whatever protocol floppy drives speak) to the host, but which let you plug a USB Mass Storage device into the front:

https://www.amazon.com/Gotek-SFR1M44-U100-1-44MB-Floppy-Emul...

Just rip out the machine's floppy drive and put one of those in its place. Button on the front pages through virtual "floppies" stored as files on your USB stick. It's sort of like using a game-console flash cart.

View on HN

Re: the floppy equivalent of a “cassette adapter” does exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath

They don’t actually emulate a floppy diskette, though. They have a signaling protocol that works through the floppy mechanism but they won’t just work in a floppy drive with the stock BIOS floppy calls. They need a driver to implement the host side of the protocol.

Sure, yeah. A real "cassette adapter" for floppies would need not just a regular one-head magnetic transducer inside the diskette, but some mechanism to determine which track the read-head is trying to read. Maybe another, much more sensitive magnetic transducer, to determine how far away the read-head is from it. Maybe a strain gauge, if the read-head actually makes contact with the medium. Or maybe just a bunch of metallic pads that close different voltages on an ADC ladder circuit — presuming that doesn't disturb the flux pattern being read out by the head.

Though I suppose you don't really need to know where the head is. You could just have an array of very small magnetic transducers, with good magnetic isolation between each one, where each one is looping over a different track; and whatever track the read-head angles onto, it just ends up "plugged into" one of the transducers that was already there waiting for it. Kind of like how a "cassette adapter" for 8-track players would have to work, if one of those was ever made.

Bonus thought: try to imagine how a "cassette adapter" for VHS would have to work. Tape with conductive wire run through it in on a matching slanted raster, etc. There's a reason they never made them :)

> There's a reason they never made them

No, the reason is that there are no situations where you'd want one. If you have a VCR connected to your TV, this means it has a video input, so why not just plug your video thing straight into that input?

There are TV/VCR all-in-ones with no external inputs other than antenna-in. A VHS “coupler” would be the only way to route past the lossy tuner-to-baseband phase of one of these (unless you’re willing to open the TV’s chassis to bodge something in.)

One of these days...I'll build a Pi Virtual Floppy

https://www.smbaker.com/raspberry-pi-virtual-floppy-for-isa-...

For those interested in the details of the protocol, there's some information here (apparently from an attempt to create a Linux driver): https://schou.dk/flashpath/

Someone did, https://www.ebay.com/itm/353764891956?hash=item525e07dd34:g:...

That's not really what I meant; the device you linked is an example of the second kind of thing, a "floppy disk emulator."

A floppy version of a "cassette adapter" would be a floppy disk on one end, and a USB cable on the other. You'd feed the adapter disk into a floppy drive; the cable would dangle out of the front of the drive; and then you'd plug the cable into a USB mass-storage device.

As with an audio cassette adapter, this would be a way to feed data into a device through the magnetic read head — making the drive believe for analogue RF reasons that there's a flux-recorded medium in there; one that reads off as whatever data you're playing down the line.

Got it, the thing I linked is more of the fm radio broadcast version.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com