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5.25 floppy disk drive for modern pc....

M

marioplayr

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Joined
Nov 1, 2009
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grand blanc, MI (USA)
hey guys! i picked up a commodore lot with an amiga 500, a 128, 64. i got all of the drives for it and the guy gave me an old laptop, an imac g3, a colorado 350 tape drive, and a ton of software for $100.00. when i got home everything worked but i found something else..... a 5.25 inch floppy disk drive. i looked on the back to see if it was for the 128 or amiga but it had this wierd cartridge looking connection on the back. i looked for some sort of ribon or cable to hook it up and i found a ribon that connected it to the 3.5 floppy disk connection in a modern pc. i havent hooked it up yet but do you guys know anything about it? also... is there any way that i can take an amiga rom and put it on a floppy disk so that the amiga can run it? thanks!!!!!

-Alex
 
I bet he is reffering to the card edge connector. Looks like the cartridge edge for a CoCo or a 2600.
 
Yeah, could be generational thing. 5.25" drives generally-speaking have 17x2 position edge connectors; earlier and later ones (e.g. FD-135GF) often have dual-row headers.
 
Yes, you have got a standard 5.25" floppy drive. It connects to the card-edge connector as you have found out. The BIOS in your PC needs to support this type of floppy drive in order to use it. Try to identify if it is a 360K DD floppy drive or a 1.2MB HD floppy drive. I have found that even quite recent PC's which still have the floppy controller at all, often will support 5.25".

Next question is which operating system you are running on your PC. If you run Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 or similar, these still have some support for 1.2MB drives. However if your floppy drive is 360K, Windows won't touch it and to my knowledge there are no 3rd party drivers that will fix it. There are some custom software packages that may be able to read and write to those drives. Also please realize the difference between a 360K floppy drive and a 360K floppy disk. The latter could be read in a 1.2MB drive and I believe would still be supported in Windows.

If you run Linux or something similar, these systems have way much better support for obsolete hardware and you will be able to read and write floppy disks as long as your computer BIOS supports it.

The answer to your final question is no. To begin with the 5.25" floppy drive, it uses MFM encoding (some PC's can be forced to FM encoding). Your Commodore 64 and 128 uses GCR encoding, which is a completely different thing. As far as I know nobody has managed to read or write to such floppy disks natively on a PC. When it comes to the Amiga, it is a miniscule bit better but still a highly proprietary format. I know some people have written software that lets you read a 3.5" Amiga floppy disk in a PC, but it may take many retries to fetch the data. I doubt you safely can write to those though.

A few years ago, the answer to your problems was a CatWeasel PCI expansion card in your PC. It contains its own, highly programmable floppy drive controller which would make it possible to read and write both 5.25" C64 disks and 3.5" Amiga disks. These cards still are available for purchase. Recently I have seen links to other hardware projects trying to implement similar functionality, although the latter still may be in development status.

If you want to transfer files to your vintage Commodore computers, usually custom cables are the way to go. I could get into detail on this, but these methods have been explained so many times that it is no point going all over again. Search for XM1541, Amiga Forever, null modem etc.
 
What's lacking in most modern machines (other than the legacy floppy drive interface itself) is BIOS support for 360K drives. If all you need to do is read and write 5.25" floppies on a 360K drive, however, you can sometimes get away with it by declaring it to your system as a 1.44M or 720K drive. Just don't expect to successfully format the things.

Mostly, Windows NT+ hates 360K 5.25' drives because they lack a "disk changed" line and it's difficult for Windows to determine when a floppy's been changed--and mistakes can be disastrous. It's not that it can't be done, but the Great Minds at Microsoft determined that it wasn't worth implementing.

If it's a 1.2M drive, be aware that diskettes formatted and written in the drive may not be readable in a 360K drive unless (1) they've been formatted from degaussed media in the 1.2M drive and (b) nothing that was written with the 360K drive is overwritten by the 1.2M drive (pretty hard to do, since the FAT and directory (-ies) get written to whenever a file is changed or extended.)
 
Just after New Year, I bought this MSI AM2 motherboard based on the VIA K8M890 chipset. While installing it, I found its BIOS not only supported a 5.25" floppy drive, but also had settings for 360K as indicated in the link. I don't know if this would be a property of the chipset, but with some luck one might get up to 2.5 - 3.0 GHz of clock frequency and still read those old 360K floppy disks.
 
carlsson said:
Just after New Year, I bought this MSI AM2 motherboard based on the VIA K8M890 chipset. While installing it, I found its BIOS not only supported a 5.25" floppy drive, but also had settings for 360K as indicated in the link. I don't know if this would be a property of the chipset, but with some luck one might get up to 2.5 - 3.0 GHz of clock frequency and still read those old 360K floppy disks.
Click to expand...
I bought a Gigabyte H55M-UD2H motherboard (circa early 2010) last week and discovered that it too supports 360K floppy drives.
 
I am sure that in the next Windows 7 Service Pack, Microsoft will have re-added support for 360K floppy drives again. :p Within short, software publishers will issue exclusive floppy disk releases for premium customers, similar to how some rock bands produce limited edition vinyl LP releases of their latest albums, next to CD and digital download.
 
I'm on a 3ghz Quad Core and have a 1.2MB drive installed that can read 360K just fine. I realize it's not good for writing them, though - I'd put both, but only one drive supported. I use a 3.5" USB that I hacked into an internal cardreader/floppy combo's case (same form factor FDD) hooked up to an internal USB port for 3.5" disks.

It would be cool if they re-did a floppy with modern capacities, like the ZIP750 but even better and newer. They can achieve at least 1.2GB just by using a combination of the ZIP750's write-style with a 5.25" size. I'd buy my software on those. :) (Hell if they went to 8" they could probably get 2.3GB, but that wouldn't be case-friendly)

If they made floppies with multiple platters, they could achieve much higher data capacity, but it might be overly expensive then - I'd rather several 1.2GB disks for an understandable price than one 5-6GB disk for a fortune.

I know that that will never get made, but here's my more feasible idea:

Why not release software on flash media? Optical media is stupid, a 4GB jump drive costs $7-10USD now so it's feasible to sell a game for $50-60 with $40-50 profit on flash media. It would last infinitely longer (I know optical is technically longer-lasting, but it's easily damaged). My media of choice would be CF cards, since they're big and strong enough to take a bit of punishment, and it would be kinda like having a cartridge slot. More likely, though, if they did ever do this, it would be SDHC, which would still be awesome.
 
Optical CAN be easily damaged, but so can flash if you back your car over it or hit it with a hammer. Optical that's well taken care of will last for years. Just make sure it goes from drive back to case and vice versa. Flash is potentially corruptible and optical is relatively "forever." I think what you REALLY want is to back to ROM cartridges. :)
 
Raven said:
If they made floppies with multiple platters, they could achieve much higher data capacity, but it might be overly expensive then - I'd rather several 1.2GB disks for an understandable price than one 5-6GB disk for a fortune.
I know that that wil l never get made, but here's my more feasible idea:
Click to expand...

Ever hear of Amlyn?

Floppies had (and still have) one big thing going for them: they're cheap and can be produced by a cookie cutter. (the medium inside the jacket is indeed called a "cookie"). 360K media was the first cousin to VHS videotape--both produced on great wide rolls and cut to size. In fact, I suspect that the decline of videotape is the primary factor that led to the quick decline of the floppy. A small number of parts (jacket, disk, (shutter and write-protect mech on 3.5") and you're done.

Flash is a very different animal with a highly complex device looking to increase storage capacity, but otherwise keep the price constant.

While data distribution on CD or DVD is inexpensive, like floppy, it's not a zero-cost item and adds another step to the process. For a one-step, cheap process, the best is vinyl LP. Stick some hot glop in a mold, press it flat, apply a label and you're done.

But why have removable media at all? I can see the day when you'll buy a one-time use key at a store that allows you to download software. No printed manuals, media or anything else.
 
I'm not sure, but I don't think it will ever go away completely. Personally I use very little retail media, and find that any copy protection based on modern media is usually inferior to that applied to the online distribution schemes.

There will always be people who demand a physical copy of their software, if nothing else, keeping a small scene for it alive just as there is still a small scene for Vinyl even though it's decidedly out of popularity.

It doesn't seem to matter what media it is, though - we've moved through type-in to cassettes, to floppies and cartridges, to optical media. I just figure that the next logical step will be distributed flash media. Obviously the more widespread medium will be network transfer, but it won't eclipse physical distribution for a long while yet, I think.
 
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