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USB Device Emulates MFM Floppy Drive

RSX11M+

RSX11M+

Veteran Member
Joined
Feb 14, 2011
Messages
1,075
I'm seeing these a lot lately.

Has anyone tried them on their PDP-11 with RQDX3??

I'd really like a hi-res pic of the innards.

Some of you will know what I'm thinking here....
 
I've been doing research on those myself lately, too funny!

Your wish is my command, sir... not a still, but still pretty decent view...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Muv25T_nRs4

I also have a link somewhere with the location and jumper settings, and their corresponding functions. Can't seem to find it, but its here on their homepage for GoTek.
http://gotek.en.ecplaza.net/

If you are going to get one soon, seems the FU version is the one to get. It has 1.2mb support, as well as the double 8 digit leds.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-White-3...C_Drives_Storage_Internal&hash=item256e79b402

I am holding back a few months and seeing if 360kb support appears...
 
Last edited:
tingo said:
I haven't tried one, and haven't seen anybody else try it on a non-IBM PC vintage computer.
As far as I have figured out, the devices only works for "IBM PC" compatible floppy formats.
I don't know how the floppy formats for the DEC are.
Click to expand...

Accepted.

However, I do know that there is/was a considerable stable of PDP-11 computers and applications alive and well in certain circles in China as late as 2010.

These won't be as easily replaced as one might think. I tripped across this awareness when researching a PEP70 manual.


We've all been hypothesizing about an MFM-USB converter for quite some time here although our target system isn't PC. Of course, most were thinking Flash drives, but as some will see from Reinhard's recent experience, there would be significant advantages to a solution which permitted a real USB Hard Drive to be the storage device.

This hardware was too close to the mark to go unnoticed or uncommented on by the PDP-11 interest group. It appears to be under development at this time, and I just wonder if it could be applicable, perhaps with a dedicated variation, or not.
 
I wouldn't mind if somebody troed one of those floppy emulators on a non-IBM PC compatible vintage machine, at their own expense. :^)
 
I bought a gotek version of the device, just toyed with a bit, I formatted a usb drive with dos and a vintage computer did boot from it.

Haven't had time to try it on many other computers and its advanced features, "Yet".

:)
 
HI, regarding to Floppy Emulators for floppy drive replacement, we have developed the FlexiDrive floppy emulator. It is OK to replace 3.5", 5.25" and 8" floppy drive units on any computer system, with DOS or Non-DOS file system.
Support FM and MFM Modulation, 1.44Mb, 1.2Mb, 800Kb, 720Kb, 640Kb, 360Kb, and also you can configure all the parameters to make it compatible with special or custom formats.
As media you can use SD card or USB Pendrive, and you can storage up 2500 floppies on the media. For more information please contact me or visit www.floppyemulator.com
I hope that this product will be useful for some of your cool Vintage Computers. Thanks and Best regards, Ariel/
 
HI, regarding to Floppy Emulators for floppy drive replacement, we have developed the FlexiDrive floppy emulator. It is OK to replace 3.5", 5.25" and 8" floppy drive units on any computer system, with DOS or Non-DOS file system.
Support FM and MFM Modulation, 1.44Mb, 1.2Mb, 800Kb, 720Kb, 640Kb, 360Kb, and also you can configure all the parameters to make it compatible with special or custom formats.
As media you can use SD card or USB Pendrive, and you can storage up 2500 floppies on the media. For more information please contact me or visit www.floppyemulator.com
I hope that this product will be useful for some of your cool Vintage Computers. Thanks and Best regards, Ariel/
 
Floppyemulator said:
I hope that this product will be useful for some of your cool Vintage Computers. Thanks and Best regards, Ariel/
Click to expand...
Hi Ariel. It might well be useful, and your information appears to be appropriate here. However, you just made 7 identical posts in a row and that shows profound disrespect for our forum and our intelligence. Once is just fine, but 7 times is just spamming - and that is generally considered rude. :)
 
tingo said:
So, do you have any non IBM-PC vintage computers?
Click to expand...

I haven't tried it on a Non IBM Computer, but will be trying it out on a AT&T 6300 soon as I just bought one.

The floppy controller I'm using in the IBM 5150 is a Magitronic card 1988, it supports 360-1.44 and supports 4 drives
and works with every floppy drive I've tried from the full height vintage right up to standard 1.44 drives and of course
this emulation contraption.

Notes:

If I leave a usb stick in the emulator, and boot the computer up, it will hang if the usb stick isn't on a
boot capable floppy selection 00-99, if it's bootable, it boots, if I have no usb stick in the emulator
- it goes to the Hard Drive.

One quirk, which may not be a quirk or perhaps I'm doing something wrong, it seems I can't have more than one
bootable emulated floppy partition on the usb stick even though it supports the emulation of 100 floppies.

If I was to create the following:
00 being dos 1
01 being dos 2
02 being dos 3
etc etc......

It will only accept the last bootable partition made on the usb stick.

Perhaps a limitation in the firmware?

So far I've made 20 floppy emulatoed partitions on a single stick, all worked.

My IBM 5150 for testing:
1 full height 360k drive,
1 30 meg Seagate RLL half height drive (formatted to 20 megs with MFM Controller)
1 Floppy Emulator half height
256K Motherboard
Intel 4.77 CPU
8-bit Seagate MFM Controller
8-bit AST 6 Pack bringing memory to 640k
8-bit VGA Card
8 bit Magitronic 1.44 Floppy Controller (Doesn't seem to work with accelerator cards such as Orchid)

:p
 
Floppyemulator said:
HI, regarding to Floppy Emulators for floppy drive replacement, we have developed the FlexiDrive floppy emulator. It is OK to replace 3.5", 5.25" and 8" floppy drive units on any computer system, with DOS or Non-DOS file system.
Support FM and MFM Modulation, 1.44Mb, 1.2Mb, 800Kb, 720Kb, 640Kb, 360Kb, and also you can configure all the parameters to make it compatible with special or custom formats.
As media you can use SD card or USB Pendrive, and you can storage up 2500 floppies on the media. For more information please contact me or visit www.floppyemulator.com
I hope that this product will be useful for some of your cool Vintage Computers. Thanks and Best regards, Ariel/
Click to expand...

Expensive, but looks impressive. :)
 
Forget the floppyemulator thing--I had a customer with mixed-density floppies and wrote these guys (the customer was commercial, so $385 was nothing) giving exact details of the format. The floppy drive used was not standard.

I never received an answer.

Here's what I know about the $30 emulators that can be found in eBay. They're limited to a single format, most often 1.44MB 3.5" 18 sector and that's fixed. You can also get the type that's intended for synth usage, which is 720K, 9 sector for about the same amount. The format cannot be changed. If you can live with that, you'll be fine.

On an AT&T 6300, a 720K one should be fine. The innards are basically an STM ARM MCU with some signal buffering (the MCU is a 3.3V device). Just about any modern 16- or 32-bit MCU with sufficient memory (the device in the Chinese unit has 32KB of RAM) probably will work. I did one with an 8-bit ATMega using external SRAM and an SDCard--it worked fine. Nowadays, if I were putting together a kit, I'd use a PIC32 in a DIP package--it should be child's play.

But for me, I deal in physical media, so emulators are of limited use.
 
If I had knowledge, I make my own emulator, but unfortunetly, my grey matter isn't up to the challenge.
 
Check this out...

Check this out...

Hope this is of help to you guys; I was trolling thru google looking for info on floppy emulators, I have some old gear from 70s and 80s some wth 8 inch floppies !! and came across this site, it is open source and code is on sourceforge, plans there for pc boards, circuit diagrams etc, PLUS if you want you can buy the unit made up with or without case for a lot less than Ariels contraption. SITE: http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/ I have NO connection with them CHEERS!
 
Jack,

Affordable? It's free for goodness sake! He gives you the Quartus II source and the PC side software. We could do this with a DE0-Nano !! I need to buy another one of those.....

I too would love to have RX02 emulation. Did you see Chuck Dickman's RX02 emulator that runs on a PC? I have been tempted to build one, but am unskilled on the software end. He gives the source code, but it needs to be compiled.

Lou
 
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