Replacement for floppy drives - Anyone tried one?

[nige the hippy]

http://www.allyda.com/products/?index-1.html


Apparently available in several flavours 720K & 1.44M

 

[mnbvcxz]

A lot of people have had good results with the HXC floppy emulator attached to a wide range of computers, musical instruments and industrial machinery.
http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/SDCard_HxC_Floppy_Emulator.pdf

 

[NathanAllan]

ooh, those are very interesting to replace the fdd in the Atari ST's here-- none of the onboard floppies work.

 

[nige the hippy]

The first ones I have seen for sale at about the same price as a 3.5" floppy drive.

 

[NathanAllan]

Maybe I'm being dense, but I can't find a price for one anywhere. This is actually making me think to make the drives in my classic machines (not a permenant change, mind you) replaceable with these.

 

[njroadfan]

Looks like they go for about $80USD, a bit more then a 3.5" FDD.

 

[Caluser2000]

There's an Indian chap selling floppy emulators http://www.floppytousb.net/
Have seen a few good reviews of these. There's also PLR ones which are quite a bit dearer. I'd imagine over time they'd be the way to go for older kit and will get cheaper as turnover rises. Just as IDE-CF adapters prices have reduced quite dramaticly.

 

[nige the hippy]

There is someone from Hong Kong doing them on ebay for around £20 - £30 - item nos 300637050494 & 290644248945

 

[tingo]

Is those (the floppytousb.net ones and those similar to it) only good for a replacement for a floppy drives used in a DOS-like machine?
I ask because it says

FAT12 File System
Fix sector of size: 512 bytes/sector
3.5" -1.44MB: 80 tracks/18 sector
5.25"-1.2MB: 80 tracks /15 sector
3.5"- 720kB: 80 tracks /9 sector

So it will probably not work for anything with different parameters (1024 bytes / sector, or different numer of sectors per track)?

 

[nige the hippy]

Ah might well be, I feel tempted though, for £20.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Is those (the floppytousb.net ones and those similar to it) only good for a replacement for a floppy drives used in a DOS-like machine?
I ask because it says

So it will probably not work for anything with different parameters (1024 bytes / sector, or different numer of sectors per track)?

Not without ordering a special version of the controller. These things are not open-source, so if you have special needs, you'll need to pay special money to the manufacturer and hope that you can communicate your needs to him.

I've been following these for years and they're okay for what they are. But don't expect miracles on the cheap. Their main clientele is the embroidery trade, followed by the CNC people.

 

[tingo]

As I suspected. Thanks.

 

[blackvisionit]

There's also a kind of professional & fully customizable emulator
that could emulate all the possible drive geometries, sector sizes, custom interfaces...
unfortunately it's extremely expensive: it's currently being used only by CNC people.

A powerful free software for backup is also provided, OmniFlop.

It can help to read/write/format almost any existing floppy disk format
and it's being widely used also for vintage-computer software backup.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Sigh--OmniFlop's authors fail to note that only formats compatible with the PC's disk controller can be read. Let them try some C64 diskettes, or Northstar floppies, or...

Sigh, he makes a lot of noise for what's been old hat for at least 25 years. Even ImageDisk will read those floppies. And the program will not be able to handle certain copy-protected fromats.

But it's Windoze, so I suspect that counts for something...most people don't know DOS from a blunt stick nowadays. More's the shame...

 

[tingo]

Someone has made Amiga-compatible firmware for the Gotek drive: http://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/