Windows 10-compatible motherboard with dual floppy drives?

[Shadow Lord]

the bios claims to. i dont have a 2.88 drive to test it, but it does work fine with my 1.2 5.25 floppy.

Forgot to ask: What OS are you running on that bad boy? Another issue is that more modern MS OSes (which you would run on a more modern MB) see to have dropped support for the older HW. Linux is probably a different story....

 

[Chuck(G)]

I seem to recall there was a few machines from the P4 and early Core2 era where the controller still supported two drives, however the BIOS omitted the code for configuring the second drive and electrically the ere was no connection between the socket and the controller. My MSI board is one of them.

Much of the time, it's the pinout on the super I/O chip. The pins are over-subscribed, so you take your choice between getting a parallel port or a second floppy drive, for example.

But even that's not so bad. Remember that unit select and motor control are external to the FDC core logic. They're just implemented with a simple latch located at port 3F2H. So, for example, you could implement a 4-drive controller when all you have is a single drive motherboard by adding a BIOS and implementing the select and motor control logic externally. Since it's a write-only register, that doesn't interfere with a thing. An add-in PCI board could do the trick.

 

[Shadow Lord]

So, for example, you could implement a 4-drive controller when all you have is a single drive motherboard by adding a BIOS and implementing the select and motor control logic externally. Since it's a write-only register, that doesn't interfere with a thing. An add-in PCI board could do the trick.

Chuck,

Maybe it is time for P4-FDC project to supplement the XT-FDC?

 

[luckybob]

Forgot to ask: What OS are you running on that bad boy? Another issue is that more modern MS OSes (which you would run on a more modern MB) see to have dropped support for the older HW. Linux is probably a different story....

windows 7. works just fine, no issues at all.

 

[yuhong]

Please note that for some AMD chipsets, it is necessary to turn off the High Precision Event Timer in order to use the motherboard floppy controller.

Yes, this is because of chipset errata related to ISA/LPC DMA and HPET.