
FC5025 USB 5.25” Floppy Controller - zaxcellent
http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html
======
snvzz
There's been a lot of open hardware floppy controller projects lately. Here's
some I know.

Fluxengine (multi-format):
[http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/](http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/)

Arduino-based :
[http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/](http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/)

USB meant specifically for Amiga floppies:
[https://github.com/jtsiomb/usbamigafloppy](https://github.com/jtsiomb/usbamigafloppy)

DiskIO. IDE+Floppy for ECB bus:
[https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:ecb:di...](https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:ecb:diskio-v3:start)

xt-fdc. Floppy controller for ISA bus:
[https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:isa:xt...](https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:isa:xt-
fdc:start)

zfdcv1. Floppy controller for S100 bus:
[https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:s100:z...](https://www.retrobrewcomputers.org/doku.php?id=boards:s100:zfdcv1:start)

~~~
Chol
You forgot
[https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle](https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle)

~~~
snvzz
I didn't forget. I hadn't heard of it. Thanks for letting me know about it.

------
deviceside
Thanks for all the interest. Our shipping operations are temporarily stopped
due to COVID-19 so please do not order if you expect to receive your order
promptly!

The stay-at-home order in our area is "until further notice" with no
expiration date. We can't provide an estimated ship date.

------
dekhn
I'm currently using a Floppy Emu on my Apple IIe- it maps disk files on an SD
card to the Apple controller's wire protocol.

My main complaint was that it doesn't sound like a disk drive (Apple drives
had a very distinctive sound), but the creator also has a device that makes
that sound if you want.

My second complaint was that it's slightly slower than an actual disk drive
(however, since my disk drives keep breaking/corrupting files, I can live with
this).

Finally, it seems to corrupt some of the data on transport (or somehow work
differently than an actual floppy), so some programs crash or fail in a
different way.

That said I continue to think it's hilarious that the disk drive for my Apple
has a far more powerful processor and more storage space than an Apple IIe
ever did, and I just use it to act like a fake disk drive.

~~~
EvanAnderson
I'm using a FloppyEmu model B on a IIgs. I haven't used it extensively for
writing, but I did find that Bank Street Writer II will not format or write to
a DSK image properly.

I'm really impressed w/ the FloppyEmu. The creator added WOZ disk image
support fairly recently and I threw him some extra cash when I downloaded the
new firmware, to show my appreciation for his continued development on the
device.

~~~
dekhn
It's really quite amazing what a hobbyist can make these days (and sell on the
internet).

I would prefer a device that supported network storage, so I could just point
it at my server which has thousands of disk images.

~~~
bdowling
> I would prefer a device that supported network storage

You may be able to do this using a Wi-Fi enabled SD card with a floppy
emulator.

------
mikepurvis
For anyone else curious about the index hole thing, there's a diagram here:

[http://electronicstechnician.tpub.com/14091/css/The-5-25-Inc...](http://electronicstechnician.tpub.com/14091/css/The-5-25-Inch-
Floppy-Disk-Construction-261.htm)

This page discusses a hardware modification that can be done to allow _two_
TEAC-55GFR drives to work together, where one is loaded with an unflipped disk
and supplies the required index signal to the other drive:

[http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/FLIPPY.htm](http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/FLIPPY.htm)

------
bluedino
If you want to reminisce about old floppy drives, and the other floppy formats
that never made it, the 8-bit guy did a good video on old storage mediums:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvXXkB2jic0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvXXkB2jic0)

~~~
Jaruzel
...and destroyed some perfectly good floppy media while he was at it! _Grrr_

~~~
rzzzt
_crunch_

The sleeves are usually contact welded shut on the sides, so if one wants to
keep the discs working, one of the edges can be undone and the disc can be
removed like a letter from an envelope. "Transplants" are also possible.

------
ac29
As far as I know the state of the art is reading and writing the raw magnetic
flux to/from a disk with something like this:
[http://softpres.org/glossary:kryoflux](http://softpres.org/glossary:kryoflux)

This method supports more or less any platform, and images can be made with
copy protection in place (for emulators that support it), or copies to new
disk media preserving the original copy protection.

~~~
paulgerhardt
Kryoflux was the state of the art in 2013 (and is pretty capable for non C64
disks) but their shady legal practices asserting copyright of ripped images[1]
makes their images blacklisted by the Internet Archive.

In 2019 a lot of people migrated to FluxEngine [2]. Though there are plenty of
alternatives [3].

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/buyj9f/co...](https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/buyj9f/comment/epjwsut)

[2]
[http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html](http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html)

[3]
[https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_...](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Rescuing_Floppy_Disks)

~~~
amelius
> asserting copyright of ripped images

I don't think there would be a legal basis here. If I sell a pen, I can't
claim ownership of the things people write with it, no matter what EULA I make
people sign. The same holds for a Xerox machine. And similarly it holds for a
tool to copy bits or flux transitions.

~~~
paulgerhardt
Not quite. As I understand it, the hardware rips disks and encodes them in
proprietary SPS flux image formats (.IPF, .STREAM, and .DRAFT) subject to a
very weird license agreement.[1] SPS does not assert ownership of the encoded
content but does assert that content encoded with their software can not be
used for commercial purposes. I suspect this “bit coloring” is at the root of
why the Internet Archive made the decision to no longer accept Kryoflux based
images and why it is not a good candidate for archival purposes.

[1]
[https://www.kryoflux.com/download/LICENCE.txt](https://www.kryoflux.com/download/LICENCE.txt)

~~~
snvzz
It's a shame they're doing this.

But at least, there is hope that fully OSS+OSHW solutions will effectively
replace it.

What they're doing is certainly not magic. Warpers existed in the 90s already.

------
simonblack
_Most PC-style drives can 't read the second side of "flippy" disks_

That's baloney. The whole idea of a 'flippy disk' was to be able to read the
second side of a single-sided disk. To make a flippy-disk you merely had to
make an index hole in the correct position of the floppy's envelope and a
write-enable notch in the correction position of the envelope also.

I made a cardboard template to mark those positions and used a hole-punch of
this kind:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_punch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_punch)

to make the holes themselves. Note that for the index hole, you had to
carefully punch a hole in the envelope _only_ , not the actual magnetic media
itself.

~~~
ansible
Making a flippy disk was to use the back side of a floppy when you only had a
single-sided drive (like I did back in the day).

If you put a flippy disk into a double-sided drive which is expecting to read
double-sided disks, you're going to have a bad day. The data on the back side
of a flippy disk is written backwards compared to how it would be written on
the back side by a double-sided floppy drive.

~~~
simonblack
If you already have a double-sided floppy drive, then you don't have any
reason to make flippy-floppies to use that second side of the floppy.

To read the second side of flippy-floppies _that you already have_ , you use
the single-sided software that wrote the disk and that only uses a single side
of the floppy and flip the floppy over. Then you transfer the data to a normal
double-sided floppy.

------
zaxcellent
When I found this sight, I was uncertain if one could still buy this device or
if the owner was even still active, but then I checked the front page: "March,
2020: Orders may be delayed due to the COVID-19 situation. Thank you for your
patience and understanding." The previous news post was from 2017. I think the
owner's commitment to this project is amazing. I think that that the owner had
to explicitly call out delays due to COVID-19 is also noteworthy.

------
winter_blue
Is there a similar VHS reader anywhere?

I've looked for a VHS-to-digital converter, but couldn't find any. The only
seeming solution is getting a TV tuner card, plugging an old VHS player to it,
and actually playing the VHS on it, and using TV Tuner software to record it.

~~~
tracker1
I don't know that there are any VHS devices that go straight to digital...
Mostly it does come down to capture cards... if you can, use an SVHS Stereo of
higher quality for the player, and svhs input... you'll get slightly higher
quality.

Though it's been well over a decade since I've touched/used anything like
this. I do have a friend that does some conversions as a business... he uses
pro grade svhs player and it's slightly better quality, but far from ideal.

Similar for old super-8 videos, mostly comes down to playing and recording via
webcam in a controlled environment. If you go completely black, the recording
washes out, so want some light in the playback/recording, and then runs
through some filters.

~~~
myself248
For film transfer, you should at least be setting manual exposure control on
the camera. But realistically, matching the film frame-advance rate precisely
to the camera shutter rate will be all sorts of tricky, and you should either
have proper synchronization, or do it a frame at a time and then capture the
audio separately.

For any video format, you're spot-on -- using S-Video instead of composite
does wonders for the quality, although if it was recorded from a composite
source, you won't squeeze blood from a stone. There are plenty of capture
cards with Y/C inputs, and modern PCs are fast enough to keep up with even the
pathetically buffer-starved models.

------
forinti
AFAIK, the cables were identical in 3.5" and 5.25" drives.

So this interface probably works for both.

I swapped out a 5.25" drive on a BBC Micro for a modern 3.5" drive and even
got it to work using HD media (the BBC used SD).

~~~
kristopolous
They were. The connectors at the end of the drives were different and that was
all (adapters were common, probably still available)

There's also scsi 3.5" drives out there. Some ThinkPads had them. In fact,
those drives were 2.88MB, just like on the NeXT, the 1.44 was common but one
of a large number of capacities in that form factor...

If you do this, use dd, not cat. Why? dd has this

noerror continue after read errors

You're going to get errors. Lots of errors! However, 80% or so of the time,
most of the disk is still recoverable, but only if you use the right tools.

It's going to be slow, real slow. A few minutes a disk with errors.

Now that I think of it, you can probably swap the NeXT and thinkpad drives
with a little effort. I bet there's a good arbitrage on eBay here if I'm
right.

There's systems that go the other way, sd card/usb disk to fake floppy but
what I really want is usb to fake floppy. In this model the usb exposes itself
as a configurable given capacity drive on both ends of the pipe, fake on both
ends

At the modern computer I copy over the files to the fake drive disk by disk
and on the old computer I tap enter accordingly. Then someone can do a 20 disk
install or whatever without a bunch of effort. It's not a hard device to make
but i checked and i still don't see it

~~~
NegativeLatency
Theres some open source firmware available for these I believe that makes them
work with more computers:
[http://www.gotekemulator.com](http://www.gotekemulator.com)

Found it:
[https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki](https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki)

------
exhilaration
Pricing is here for the curious:
[http://shop.deviceside.com/](http://shop.deviceside.com/)

------
renewiltord
I think I encountered 5¼" floppies only near the beginning of my computing
life so I only had a couple at the school lab but this is the first I've heard
of _flippy_ disks. What a clever name! If most PC drives couldn't read these,
which manufacturer drives did people use?

~~~
toast0
IBM pcs generally had double-sided drives. No need to flip, because the drive
had heads for the top and bottom. Other computers varied, usually depending on
when they introduced floppy drives (double sided is more complex, but better
experience).

Note that the data orientation will be different on the bottom of a single
sided disk written with the disk upside down than if written on a double sided
drive.

------
Nextgrid
Isn't there an USB FDD standard? Why are they using a proprietary protocol
instead of that?

~~~
bcoates
This acts as a controller that attaches to a conventional PC floppy disk drive
(which does not have internal controller electronics like a modern hard
drive).

It's different than a USB floppy disk drive, which is more like a weird
integrated ATAPI device on a USB-ATAPI bridge

~~~
wanderingjew
For anyone buying this, please keep in mind USB-ATAPI floppy drives are
_especially_ broken in nearly all modern OSes.

I'm speaking from experience with ZIP drives, including the internal ATAPI and
IDE versions. Support for Linux was dropped a while ago, but you can load that
in as a Kernel module. I still haven't gotten that to work.

Current Win10 install _kinda_ works, but the best success I've had is with an
old 32-bit installation of WinXP. Even then, doing the things you'd like to do
with a floppy drive (reading reliably, reading when inserted, decoupling the
unmount/eject ((as opposed to the old way Mac handled it))) mechanism is
difficult. Also, some USB->ATAPI bridges simply don't work with ATAPI floppy
devices.

If you've ever wanted to solve a problem that no one else has attempted
(because no one cares, at all) there's a project for you.

~~~
Gregordinary
Thanks for confirming my suspicions with this comment. Was just messing with
an internal Zip-750 drive. I tried both SATA to IDE adapters and an internal
USB to IDE adapter. I tried with two different drives using Ubuntu 20.04 and
jazip.

With both drives there was a brief moment the the zip disk showed up, once.
Then never again.

I eventually just purchased a PCIe IDE controller card and that works as
expected.

------
devonstopps
Interesting device. would be great if this supported odd formats like this one
does:
[https://www.vesalia.de/e_catweaselmk4.htm](https://www.vesalia.de/e_catweaselmk4.htm)

~~~
reaperducer
Did. That product, and its successor, are discontinued.

------
WalterBright
I always wondered why PCs maintained support for 3.5" disks, but not for
5.25". Fortunately, beforehand I had presciently copied my hundreds of
floppies to CD-ROMs. But I still keep finding more :-)

~~~
toast0
PCs still support for 5.25" discs, but the 3.5" disks are better (smaller,
more durable, more data per disk, unless you're comparing 5.25" high density
vs 3.5" double density. By the 90s, cd-rom was clearly the future, but a boot
disk came in handy, so one floppy drive was enough for most people. 3.5" disks
also had the 2.88 drives, and LS-120 drives with compatible form factors.

~~~
WalterBright
> PCs still support for 5.25" discs

Not for the last 10 years. Even though the cable fits, the BIOS does not
recognize it.

~~~
snvzz
I haven't seen any motherboard with FDC for over a decade.

And I could use one... I actually do use floppies still.

~~~
myself248
Guess I'll be keeping my socket AM2+ board around indefinitely, then! I just
tossed a Phenom into it to buy it some relevance as the AthlonX2 which it held
for the last decade was feeling a bit old, but I'm considering going back just
for thermal reasons -- my god, Phenoms run hot.

That machine has all my floppy, cdrom, and internal Zip drives in it right
now. I could stand to upgrade it to SSD though; the old 120GB is getting noisy
and I suspect the bearings are shot.

~~~
snvzz
Yeah, I use some even older athlon K75 for this.

I do actually wonder if there's any sort of EFI support for floppies.

Edit: [https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-
US/f1...](https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-
US/f17db175-d1)

What a mess. Likely just works on netbsd, but I hate this sort of thing.

------
reaperducer
I see that it's been tested up to MacOS Sierra. I wonder if this could be used
on Catalina.

I've read online that even USB floppy drives are no longer supported in macOS.
Which is disappointing.

~~~
deviceside
It can be used up to Mojave. The current drivers don't work on Catalina. We
hope to release an update soon, but there is no ETA.

------
dschuetz
The limitations of this one are pretty crippling. It hardly counts as a
controller, it's just a USB floppy reader. Even the software has some absurd
limitations.

------
floppy123
Is there any 5.25 or 3.5 floppy drive hardware remake project out there for
reading/writing floppies without using ancient hardware?

------
davestephens
I don't need one, but I want one. Knowing my dad he still has all of the
software from our Amstrad 1640 stashed in the garage!

------
rkagerer
The computer I use today still has 3.5" floppy drive.

~~~
snvzz
Many of my computers which I still use do.

But my main workstation doesn't. The primary reason is the motherboard lacks a
floppy controller.

------
sawyatiaye
ok

