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Hooking up an old 5.25 to a new computer

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DPAH

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Hey, I'm getting back into some vintage gaming. I'm going to set up a whole virtual machine with 98 and the works - so hopefully that will go smooth. My current problem is that I have some games contained on 5.25" disks but no drive to put them in! I found one on ebay:link
It says it has a 37-pin serial cable. Are there any cards I could install that would allow me to hook it up to my computer? Would it even work in an XP machine? I've been searching for the past hour and haven't come up with another solution (the other solution being, of course, a nice internal drive that could connect to some easily available add-in card).

Any help would be appreciated. I could thank you a whole lot.
 
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Windows 98 should be fine in terms of read/write, also providing you motherboard supports the 5.25 (360k/1.2mb) drives, many "newer" mothers I have seen lately only support 1.44mb floppy drives if they even have a floppy controller anymore, remember to get one of each as using the wrong disks in the wrong drives may lead to premature disk death, something to do with magnet stregnths I think, not realvent but Windows XP will can read other disk formats but cant (has a problem) with formating older media.

If you only need 1 5.25 variety you could get away with a converter to go from 37pin to the slot edge type connector on 5.25 drives, OR just get a floppy cable with both connectors on them.
Like This:
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=10946&C=SO&U=strat15

IF you need/want both types of 5.25s, you could get a seperate floppy controller card that supports 2 floppies internally and externally and use the nice external floppy from your link.

I have build myself a dedicated media interchange system with drives / connectors and adaptors for all type of media storage and can "quickly" (being relative) transfer data between media.

just my $0.02
 
That 4869 box is made to attach to a PS/2 Diskette Adapter/A. It's close, but not a dead ringer for an XT/Compaticard/generic external drive connector. IBM swapped a few lines (don't ask me why) when doing this one, but fortunately, it's fairly simple to swap them back (pry the connector off the cable, slit the webbing between a couple of wires, move them and crimp the whole affair back together).

These things have nice little power supplies in them and are generally well constructed.

Unless you're in this guy's back yard, however, the shipping on it's a killer--odd, because they're not very heavy.
 
Thanks for the responses. I just checked in my bios and it turns out my motherboard supports... 750k and 1.44 3.5' floppies. I guess I'm doomed, huh?

Anyways, if I was to get a cheap barebones is there a certain model of internal floppy drive that would work - maybe on some hardware site I don't know of? Most of the stuff listed at eBay is for Tandy and Apple. I'd prefer not to mess with the wiring if possible... but Chuck, were you saying it was meant to attach to something like THIS? I'm not familiar with vintage machines so I'm probably wrong here.
 
It'll work! I running Windows Vista on a Gigabyte MA78GM MoBo which allows one floppy snd mine is 5.25 incher. Works great. The reason I it keep around is that I still dabble with Quick BASIC and have a ton of games and stuff on those old 5.25 discs. Caution: If your BIOS permits 2 floppies, make sure you have the "split" & "twist" type cable. You can find one most anywhere.

:-D
 
DPAH said:
Thanks for the responses. I just checked in my bios and it turns out my motherboard supports... 750k and 1.44 3.5' floppies. I guess I'm doomed, huh?
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You mean 720K? If all you want to do is read the things, you can call the drive a 720K 3.5" and it should work.

If you use MS-DOS, you can override the default drive selection with a DRIVPARM statement in your config.sys file.
 
Yes, I meant 720k, and all I want to do is read them. And YESSSS! I really don't have the money for an all new, albeit cheap, barebones system, so if I can read them while calling the drive a 720k 3.5", that's perfectly fine by me. Chuck, I thought DOS was stripped out of XP. All I have here in a gimped shell.

Agent Orange, is it internal? What make and model of drive do you have?
 
DPAH said:
Yes, I meant 720k, and all I want to do is read them. And YESSSS! I really don't have the money for an all new, albeit cheap, barebones system, so if I can read them while calling the drive a 720k 3.5", that's perfectly fine by me. Chuck, I thought DOS was stripped out of XP. All I have here in a gimped shell.
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Nope, FAT12 is very much supported by XP (and Vista for that matter).
 
DPAH said:
I really don't have the money for an all new, albeit cheap, barebones system, so if I can read them while calling the drive a 720k 3.5", that's perfectly fine by me.
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Where are you located? I'm pretty sure you'd be able to find discarded machines that would work for you for FREE. I have several in my basement that would suit your needs but you'd have to come to New Jersey to get one.
 
linuxlove said:
Though if i remember right, you can't format 720K disks under XP. I think it might work if you use the DOS FORMAT command though
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I hear that they only removed the /F:size flag from the command. It may work if you supply the correct number of tracks and sectors explicitly. I know I was able to format 360K 5.25" floppies under XP that way. There are lists of the figures required for different DOS-compatible formats out there on the web.
 
I can format 360K (/n:9/t:40) on a 1.2MB 5.25" drive, but if there's no BIOS support for 360K 5.25" drives on your system, XP isn't going to format them as such, even if you call them 720K drives. And newer systems don't even have BIOS support for 1.2MB 5.25" drives.
 
kb2syd said:
Where are you located? I'm pretty sure you'd be able to find discarded machines that would work for you for FREE. I have several in my basement that would suit your needs but you'd have to come to New Jersey to get one.
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Florida. In the suburbs surrounding Orlando. I can't even find a used bookstore around here, much less vintage tech stuff.
 
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From Craigs List:
Winter park FL has a PIII with monitor for $20
Winter Haven has 2 mostly complete machines for free
Granted not all are free, but a start.

You should also try the local Freecycle group. I see free ones here in rural (yes rural) New Jersey every week. I see they had over 600 posts in May. I'm not a member so I can't review what they were.

My daughter lives in Kissimee. I'll see what she knows.
Kelly
 
cosam said:
I hear that they only removed the /F:size flag from the command. It may work if you supply the correct number of tracks and sectors explicitly. I know I was able to format 360K 5.25" floppies under XP that way. There are lists of the figures required for different DOS-compatible formats out there on the web.
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This is indeed how it's done, and how I do it. Doesn't end well usually, on a newer system, though.
 
cosam: I hear that they only removed the /F:size flag from the command.
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Who's they? If we're talking about the MS format command that may be true, but I can't think of a good reason to use that particular program although I know that some do. I do note, however, that people have remarked on it's shortcomings. (I guess we're looking at one of them!) There are many other choices. Certainly, Reifsnyder's FORMAT.EXE is very functional and appears to work without artificial limitations. IIRC it is the one that comes with freedos, but it should be easy to find. Look for FMT091V.ZIP.
 
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Ole Juul said:
Who's they? If we're talking about the MS format command that may be true, but I can't think of a good reason to use that particular program although I know that some do. I do note, however, that people have remarked on it's shortcomings. (I guess we're looking at one of them!)
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Yes, I was referring to Microsoft's format command, and then purely in response to the comment that Windows XP may not be able to format 720K disks.

Ole Juul said:
There are many other choices. Certainly, Reifsnyder's FORMAT.EXE is very functional and appears to work without artificial limitations. IIRC it is the one that comes with freedos, but it should be easy to find. Look for FMT091V.ZIP.
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Indeed. Can such third party tools get around the discussed BIOS limitations?
 
cosam: Indeed. Can such third party tools get around the discussed BIOS limitations?
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I reread the thread and now see what you mean. Sorry Steve, I got everything wrong here. :) For some reason I read the OP's: "Anyways, if I was to get a cheap barebones ..." and took it to mean that the choice of computer was still up in the air and so too the BIOS. I realize now we're not actually talking about software limitations.
 
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