Emulator - floppy drive

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piso mojado
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Emulator - floppy drive

Post by piso mojado »

I have these ingredients:

An intel laptop running OSX 10.6.6

An Imation external usb floppy drive

A stack of double density 3.5" floppies


Is it possible to use an emulator to power the drive and rescue the golden data from those disks and onto my laptop?
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Ronald P. Regensburg
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Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

An emulator will not help. The external floppy drive can read 1.4MB HD floppies and 720K PC floppies, but it cannot read 800K DD Mac floppies. Those floppies (and 400K floppies) can only be read by drives that can read with the variable speed that was used to write those floppies, a method to increase the capacity of the floppies (from 720K to 800K) that was used by Apple only. So you will need to find someone who has a working old Mac with built-in floppy drive.

I heard about the existence of PC (Windows) software that is supposed to be able to create disk image files from 800K Mac floppies on a PC with floppy drive, but I do not know anything about that. It is hard to imagine how this could result in mountable and readable image files.

Edit: KryoFlux builds floppy drive controller boards that support many floppy formats, among which 800K Mac floppies:
http://www.kryoflux.com/
http://forum.kryoflux.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=135
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24bit
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Post by 24bit »

Hello,
I think you should look for someone owning an old Mac from the days before USB was introduced.
Many forum members are keeping such old devices with floppy drive and ethernet out of nostalgia.
I just made some diskcopy4.2 800k images from some old stuff the other day.
If you happen to be a EU resident, I can create images of your disks, if you like.
Best wishes!
piso mojado
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Post by piso mojado »

Thank you both very much for your replies. 24bit, thanks a lot for your kind offer to help, but I'm an American living in California, so I think I'll find a local solution.

The Kyroflux website looks very interesting.
Jorpho
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Post by Jorpho »

DISK2FDI will do it to, but it's expensive:
http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/
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adespoton
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Re: Emulator - floppy drive

Post by adespoton »

That's not really going to help in this situation -- he's (or at least he was 3 years ago) attempting to get data off the 800k floppies. The Estonia solution is for people with old PC hardware but no access to functional floppy disks -- they can drop in one of these, and use SD cards instead.

We've got another thread on here about someone who has done the same thing for the DSDD 800k disks though.

I'm actually in a situation where I'm trying to do the reverse -- I've got the floppy disk, and I've got a Mac Plus, but the software I want to load onto the disk is on my modern Mac. Currently no bootable floppy for the Plus :(

Getting one of those Mac floppy emulators would actually be my solution.
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