8″ Fairlight Floppy Disk Imaging | Hacker News Reader

8″ Fairlight Floppy Disk Imaging

synthroom.com

55 pointsnickt19 comments

Wow, he's got original Fairlight 8" disks from the Pet Shop Boys' first album:

https://synthroom.com/fairlight-cmi/psb-fairlight-disks/

These Fairlight sequences were apparently made for a PSB tour that never happened. Here's an example of what they sound like:

https://synthroom.com/fairlight-cmi/psb-fairlight-disks/psb-...

This raw output from the Fairlight CMI sounds a lot like an 8-channel Amiga to my ears.

Usually you hear this legendary instrument as part of a mix with a lot more going on in production, so the dryness of the low-resolution samples is not so apparent.

> This raw output from the Fairlight CMI sounds a lot like an 8-channel Amiga to my ears.

The Fairlight CMI DACs were 8 bit and worked at quite low sampling rate compared to today standards. Many samples also were taken in the 80s from synths and drum machines of that era, therefore they sound similar to those used with the Amiga (aside the CMI having much better anti aliasing filters). Probably many of these have been ported directly and used in tracker music, which at that time was rampant.

Seeing "Fairlight" and "Floppy" in the same sentence probably recalls a different set of memories among some others here. My first thought was wondering whether they had released anything on 8" floppies.

The demo group was probably named after the synth (sampler) tho...

According to Wikipedia: "The name was taken from the Fairlight CMI synthesizer which Strider saw Jean-Michel Jarre use on some of his records" - sadly without source.

Ditto, I could almost hear the cracktro chiptunes.

8" disks predate chip tunes (clack clack brrrrr smack)

For people not familiar, it's a synthesizer that has a really rich user interface from the late 70s

Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairlight_CMI

I have two huge boxes full of 8" floppies. They belonged to my father, who used them to work on two Olivetti BCS 2025. [1] Unfortunately the BCS units are long time gone. Needlessly to say, it would be nice to recover data from those 8" floppies...

BCS units were running Olivetti BCOS 5 on NEC 8080 (2 Mhz), 64Kb RAM.

[1] http://museo.dagomari.prato.it/singolo.php?cod=149&ord=1

Whoa, that unit sure looks the business! Olivetti really had quite beautiful and futuristic design back in their heyday, as proven once again in this example.

I still remember from those days how sturdy was the metal plane encapsulating the keyboard. It was so rock solid that when it was decommissioned by my father, he gave them to a local blacksmith to serve him as working board... I know, I know. Sad and truculent epilogue for those poor machines – but that is what happend.

For folks that enjoy the idea of fooling around with ancient and weird computer tech, I can recommend the YouTube channel Usagi Electric. I'm there for the valves but there's plenty of other stuff, including 8" floppy drive repair shenanigans.

https://www.youtube.com/@UsagiElectric

Heh, of course it's ImageDisk on a DOS PC...that's how most of us do it :P

If you do need to hook an 8" drive to a PC for whatever reason, the D-Bit FDADAP is good value and makes it a lot simpler:

http://www.dbit.com/fdadap.html

Among other things, it counts step in/out and automatically asserts TG43 for reduced write current on inner tracks. ImageDisk will let you assert this via a pin on the parallel port, too.

Worth pointing out that the disks in question are using the same industry standard MFM sector encoding that started with the IBM 3740 and was reused more or less unchanged[1] for years and years. The hack here amounts to just making a special cable to get the signals into a PC floppy controller.

FWIW: they should have used a greaseweazle instead, which avoids the need for the legacy host hardware.

[1] Different systems used different sector sizes and counts, and occasionally different flux clock rates. But there were a bunch of ICs on the marked from NEC and WDC that baked this format in hardware, so only Apple and Commodore did anything different.

Yeah, those WD 1771, 1773, 1793 FDC chips, and that NEC 765 were all over the place. Iirc they'd handle track seeking for you, and for sector read/write you either needed a DMA channel or a (fast enough) CPU to move data bytes to/from the FDC, there was no internal buffering. The other thing the FDC would do is format tracks and sectors. There were all these header bytes that you wouldn't see during regular data read/write ops, but presumably allowed the FDC to recognize when to start transferring between the head and the system bus.

And "smarter" is not always better: the NEC 765 (and later compatibles) used in PCs would always interpret those header bytes instead of allowing the software to read and write arbitrary "raw" data. This made certain formats impossible to duplicate - a benefit for copy protection schemes, but not in the user's interest - and it also limited how much a driver could optimize disk access. There was one command to read the next sector ID that the drive head was passing over, and another to read the contents of all sectors in the order that they appeared on the disk, but no way to do both at the same time. You couldn't read an entire track in whatever order and sort it out in software.

Many disk formats had sectors arranged in an interleaved order to give slow computers more time for processing the data, or skewed the starting sector number from track to track to optimize for the seek time during linear reading. So just reading the sector contents without the headers wouldn't work, plus the "read all sectors" command always waited for what it assumed was the start of track.

Some other controllers (at least some of the Western Digital ones you mentioned) would instead just detect the sync pattern at the start of a sector, and then send everything including the control bytes to the host. They could also format and write an entire track in one operation, with exact control over the layout.

Still there was a lot of clever hacks to make the PC controller do things it wasn't designed to do. Like formatting a track with lots of very small sectors (128 bytes), most of which would then be completely overwritten - header and all - to become part of just a few large ones. That allowed different sector sizes on the same track to give a bit of extra space, but with very little possibilities to control the gap lengths (necessary due to the mechanical nature of floppy drives). So this format wasn't as optimal or reliable as it could have been with a "dumber" controller.

It's hard to believe, but IBM would actually use this crazy format to distribute their installation diskettes!

Providing your goods on 8" floppies appears to be a very strong copy protection these days.

I've always had a weak spot for 8" floppy disks but i've never owned an 8" disk drive. Perhaps one day i'll find one on a flea market…

They're much like any other floppy drive, just bigger :P Reliability can be quite good, as the tracks are huge and far apart. I run several sets regularly and after the initial repair and burn-in phase, most of them require no adjustment for years. They do require cleaning, but using high-quality media really cuts that down.

There are exceptions. Pertec 8" drive are terrible, for example. A friend who runs them regularly has added BNC jacks to the front of the enclosure to facilitate the necessary frequent alignments. The hub motors sometimes stall for no reason and will blow up the drivers if you don't open the drive door soon enough. One has to wonder how a company that did such an excellent job with 9-track computer tape drives screwed up floppies so badly!

I have an 8" disk drive, can't remember where I got it, not used it though.

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