People who won't give up floppy disks

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

Whenever I hear about this, it seems weird.

Not that there are still ancient systems using them.

But because it feels like by now someone would have invented some kind of adaptor device for modern storage. Like those old Cassette adapters for cars, but for USB drives.

Maybe stick some kind of micro controller in to detect the read write spins in the little "disk" and rapid output the data as if it's a floppy.

I use this one. =^-^=
Amazon link >> Amazon.com

 

[Monica Dream]

I bought a usb floppy drive last fall and a few floppies (unopened, around $20 or so for like 10, I think?). I assumed there would be a way to plug them into 86box ala virtualbox ...but there isn't. :|

 

[Noodles]

I use this one. =^-^=
Amazon link >> Amazon.com

Oh that is neat. I had not considered emulating the entire drive and not just the disk.

 

[Noodles]

I bought a usb floppy drive last fall and a few floppies (unopened, around $20 or so for like 10, I think?). I assumed there would be a way to plug them into 86box ala virtualbox ...but there isn't. :|

You could always make img files of the physical disks and then mount them.

 

[Monica Dream]

You could always make img files of the physical disks and then mount them.

Yes, and of course I do. But it would have been need to try tinkering with some low-level shit ("how to bootstrap in 512k of assembly") someday with actual hardware. I think I could still do it with Virtualbox, but Virtualbox isn't an emulator and doesn't accurately create any specific machine. 86box does, albeit only machines from the late 90's and earlier (the 8088 in 78 up and forward to 99 or so).

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Yes, and of course I do. But it would have been need to try tinkering with some low-level shit ("how to bootstrap in 512k of assembly") someday with actual hardware. I think I could still do it with Virtualbox, but Virtualbox isn't an emulator and doesn't accurately create any specific machine. 86box does, albeit only machines from the late 90's and earlier (the 8088 in 78 up and forward to 99 or so).

FreeDOS running under Qemu? Maybe even DOSbox would work.

 

[Monica Dream]

FreeDOS running under Qemu? Maybe even DOSbox would work.

These days, I'd just stick with MS DOS. It's open source, after all! One of these days I'm gonna finish my project of pulling in needed apps from FreeDOS to fill the gaps on DOS 4.0 (e.g. Edit).

DOSBox-X rocks, especially on windows where it's tied in to windows explorer. That's definitely a viable (dos) dev enviroment, at least for simple stuff (probably for complex stuff too -but I haven't tried).

To go back full-circle; I suspect you could set a usb/floppy as "a" in DOSBox-X, though I haven't tried. Now I'm on Linux (because FUCK RECALL[1]) and not intending on going back (screen tearing or no) I won't be finding out.

[1]
Windows Recall demands an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn’t earned

A PR disaster: Microsoft has lost trust with its users, and Windows Recall is the straw that broke the camel's back

 

[Noodles]

Yes, and of course I do. But it would have been need to try tinkering with some low-level shit ("how to bootstrap in 512k of assembly") someday with actual hardware. I think I could still do it with Virtualbox, but Virtualbox isn't an emulator and doesn't accurately create any specific machine. 86box does, albeit only machines from the late 90's and earlier (the 8088 in 78 up and forward to 99 or so).

Time to hit up eBay, though I feel like shipping for old PC hardware would be huge. Old PCs weighed a lot.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Get an old laptop? Early thinkpad?

 

[Monica Dream]

Get an old laptop? Early thinkpad?

Certainly an option, but not one worth the effort and expense. I can continue to simply use 86box.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

But old Thinkpads are swimming in retro cool. You're cooler just touching it.

 

[Free]

But old Thinkpads are swimming in retro cool. You're cooler just touching it.

Only when you touch the trackpoint.

 

[Kokoro Fasching]

Only when you touch the trackpoint.

 

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

Or the little red power LED that makes up the dot in the "i".

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Kinda reminds me of that one early Blackberry that had a teeny trackball in the middle of the thumb-keyboard that had a habit of popping out and getting lost. ^^

 

[Khamon]

Just had a call from someone whose been running a "repair" on a thumb drive all morning wanting to know how much longer they should expect it to take. Heat death of the universe seemed a little daunting to them though it's likely not long enough. Of course they (don't) have those critically important files backed up somewhere.

 

[detrius]

I remember playing all those games on my C64 a long time ago, especially the load times. Using floppy disks was a huge improvement over tapes, though.

This one was one of my favourites:


(The actual gameplay footage starts at 16:55)

The downside of many of those games was that they didn't have a save function, so you had to play from start to the end.

 

[Khamon]

Rendezvous with Rama was my favourite. My64 only ever had a tape drive. But my IIe had two (2), count them TWO1, disk drives and it was pure Heaven it was.

Edit: specified “my” computers, rather than a generic “the,” because the original format was not true as stated.

 

[Lori Claremont]

Commodore 64 had a floppy drive, it was the 1541... gad the things I remember off the top of my head decades after the fact...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

The 1541 has its own 6502 and you could download programs to it to do things like copying floppies from one drive to another without going through the main computer. Which was a good thing because the connection to the 1541 was via a really slow serial bus, slower than the none-too-fast floppy mechanism itself, so this almost doubled the speed of copies.

The Apple II floppy, on the other hand, was really fast because the bits went directly to the Apple II without any processing. The bit timing and sector decoding was handled by the Apple II itself.

Both of these approaches allowed for some wicked copy protection mechanisms.