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how to access Floppy Drive on parallel port

G

gleegum

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Apr 7, 2016
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I recently got a external mitsubishi parallel port floppy drive model: MF355H-332MR.
I'm trying to use it under windows xp or windows 98se, or DOS 6.22.
Does it need a driver? I can't make it work.
I didn't find much info about this drive.

Thanks
 
I believe that it's not going to work. From what I can determine, the MF335H-332MR was specific to the Acer Travelmate 310 notebook. See my comments on other threads about LPC superIO chips. Miles away internally from a MicroSol Backpack.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I believe that it's not going to work. From what I can determine, the MF335H-332MR was specific to the Acer Travelmate 310 notebook. See my comments on other threads about LPC superIO chips. Miles away internally from a MicroSol Backpack.
Click to expand...

You are right, it does not work. I see that I'm not gonna be able to make it work on my machines then.
Thanks
 
Hi,
I have a GCT-8IT motherboard pentium MMX 200 with a super I/O chip.
SMSC FDC37C669, in the datasheet it is indicated:
- Floppy Disk available on parallel port pins, should a floppy drive work on the parallel port?
it's just out of curiosity
Thanks.
 
You need to distinguish between generic external floppy disk drives that used the parallel port - these work on every system, as long as the parallel port is bi-directional and the driver is loaded - and systems that had no internal floppy drive and allowed to connect an external one via the parallel port. These latter ones are proprietary and don't need a driver, as the system's BIOS has built-in support. They don't work on other systems, however.

In other words: to use a generic external floppy disk drive for the parallel port, there is nothing else needed than a bi-directional parallel port. A floppy drive made for a specific system however will not work on other systems.
 
Some of the model specific floppy drives route signals from the floppy controller through the parallel port. If the pinout is known, an adapter could allow such a drive to work off of a standard external floppy connecter. Not much point now but probably easier than tracking down the correct matching laptop.

The printer may not function if the parallel port is operating in floppy mode. Just an idiosyncrasy to note.
 
krebizfan said:
Some of the model specific floppy drives route signals from the floppy controller through the parallel port. If the pinout is known, an adapter could allow such a drive to work off of a standard external floppy connecter. Not much point now but probably easier than tracking down the correct matching laptop.
Click to expand...
Pretty much what I alluded to in #4.
 
according to the link it is therefore preferable to put it in SSP for output data rather than ECP or ECP which allows input data
 
andromeda92 said:
according to the link it is therefore preferable to put it in SSP for output data rather than ECP or ECP which allows input data
Click to expand...
SPP works but the data is input to the parallel port a nibble (4 bits) at a time (via non-data pins). Two transfers are required to read a byte (8 bits).

The later port types are preferred because data is input to the parallel port a byte at a time.
 
Practically speaking, does it matter much on a floppy drive? Several years ago, I published on this forum the source code for interfacing to the Microsolutions Backpack floppies. It seemed to be fast enough.
 
Has anyone ever put together a field guide to different types of external floppies and what machines they are known to work with?
 
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