Malvineous
Experienced Member
Not that I mean to keep going on about the Kryoflux, but you're right when you say the hardware is pretty simple. The KF is just a standard ARM development board with a few customisations like a floppy drive connector. The manual comes with a schematic. The firmware handles basic drive control, but the software is what makes the difference. It's this which is able to decode all the disk formats, and I believe it's so far able to do this better than anything that came before it (I think the Catweasel's poor performance is what inspired the Kryoflux in the first place.) As to whether it can write back all sorts of odd floppy formats, you'd have to ask the Kryoflux team. I believe they're able to write "weak" bits used by some copy protection schemes, so I would be surprised if there was something it couldn't write (providing of course the drive itself is able to.) IIRC analogue calibration disks are one of the things it can't write.
I am interested in reversing the process as lynchaj mentions, so you could plug the KF into a floppy controller instead of a floppy drive, and then make disk images appear as actual disks on a real machine. I believe the latest hardware revisions might be able to do this, if someone were to write the firmware for it. The Kryoflux team aren't interested in this (or writing firmware to make the KF appear as a standard USB floppy drive) because their focus is on preserving original disks, and primarily those from games. They don't see the point in wearing out floppy drives and disks by using them more than the minimum necessary to get a good copy.
I hadn't heard about the XT-FDC project, but it's great to hear people are working on things like this. The XT-FDC project though is aimed at a completely different audience than the Kryoflux is. The Kryoflux is designed to preserve the data in full - from copy protection to tracking information added by disk duplication companies. Once this data is preserved, essentially the disks are no longer important. Their biggest customers appear to be museums and the like. But the XT-FDC project seems more aimed at people who want to actually use real floppy drives, all the time. Not that that's a problem, but the two devices serve difference purposes. If you want to use floppies all the time you'll be disappointed with a Kryoflux, and if you want a flux perfect copy you'll be disappointed with anything else!
I am interested in reversing the process as lynchaj mentions, so you could plug the KF into a floppy controller instead of a floppy drive, and then make disk images appear as actual disks on a real machine. I believe the latest hardware revisions might be able to do this, if someone were to write the firmware for it. The Kryoflux team aren't interested in this (or writing firmware to make the KF appear as a standard USB floppy drive) because their focus is on preserving original disks, and primarily those from games. They don't see the point in wearing out floppy drives and disks by using them more than the minimum necessary to get a good copy.
I hadn't heard about the XT-FDC project, but it's great to hear people are working on things like this. The XT-FDC project though is aimed at a completely different audience than the Kryoflux is. The Kryoflux is designed to preserve the data in full - from copy protection to tracking information added by disk duplication companies. Once this data is preserved, essentially the disks are no longer important. Their biggest customers appear to be museums and the like. But the XT-FDC project seems more aimed at people who want to actually use real floppy drives, all the time. Not that that's a problem, but the two devices serve difference purposes. If you want to use floppies all the time you'll be disappointed with a Kryoflux, and if you want a flux perfect copy you'll be disappointed with anything else!