flashfloppy VS floppy-driver-rs

FYI (or others using retro equipment with floppy disks) there's a cheap floppy disk emulator called Gotek that can be connected in place of your 3.5" drive and has an USB connector where you can put a thumb drive with disk images.

For that device there's an Open Source firmware project called FlashFloppy [0] that enhances its features. And I've found today that there's an Open Hardware reimplementation [1] of the Gotek hardware that's compatible with the FlashFloppy Firmware.

  0: https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy

The other side of this coin is emulating a floppy drive in software: https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy

Flashfloppy.

If you're not too particular, you can pick up a GoTek unit for $30 and use it as-is, with no firmware or hardware mods.

For wiring see the diagrams on this page https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki/Hardware-Mods

I prefer to retrofit old equipment with more reliable technology.

Highly recommend Keir Fraser's Flash Floppy project: https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy

=)

I thought so, too, when I got mine. Some people do the modifications before selling them on ebay or wherever and so they are effectively plug and play, but I discovered that unless that's the case I needed to do some stuff to make it work. As the other user suggested, you want to get FlashFloppy. The installation process was a little involved to be honest, but not impossible with the step by step instructions I had found. Unfortunately I can't easily link you anything because there are different versions of Flashfloppy and different versions of the Gotek and different steps depending on what you have. I'd start by looking up flashfloppy and looking through the various instructions. Here is a place to start: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki/Firmware-Programming

Specifically, one that supports Flashfloppy.

Interesting and fun project! I found the MFM encoding page particularly enlightening as it explained why you have to write a full sector at a time on a floppy, even though there's nothing physically constraining you to that so far as I could see on the electromechanical/hardware side of things.

And on that page the "make sure the compiler didn't inject 10,000 lines of boundary checks" bit told me everything I needed to know about what language the project was written in :lol: - here's the link to the driver: https://github.com/SharpCoder/floppy-driver-rs

I'm glad to see the Teensy continuing to get love; I adopted it back when it was at v1 and v2 as it was just such a complete no-brainer of a better choice than the Arduino stack everyone was using back then. I think now there's even an Arduino-on-Teensy software stack, but I've moved to just using STM32 directly and have greatly enjoyed coding for that target in rust.

Head on over to the https://floppy.cafe if you want to learn everything about how these ancient disks work. I spent the last few months bit-banging a device from the 90s and documenting my process. Hopefully this information proves useful to somebody. Aliens, technoarcheologists, retro computing geeks? I'm not sure who my target audience is, but it was a lot of fun to throw this together and I hope you can enjoy my little slice of the 90s!

Head on over to the floppy cafe, if you want to learn more! https://floppy.cafe/ and here's my github repo with the full source for my project: https://github.com/SharpCoder/floppy-driver-rs