This just looks so odd, the mid-nullties design of the case, the front USB headers and a 5,25 inch floppy drive... It's a Chinon drive and works like a charm. No belt drive and I have spent hours cleaning off little grains of dust from the inside. I did in fact boot my IBM PC-DOS 2.1 disk on this computer!

So I hear you asking "Why?" and the answer is simply that I have a bunch of these old 360k disks and I would like to backup all the data they hold and possibly write new data for my 8088 machines. I can easily download files, put them on a USB drive, and copy or imgwrite straight to a floppy disk using this machine. Kind of a time bridge machine. I found newer hardware like PIII and P4 not very supportive of anything less than 1.2 MB floppies and the older 486 guys doesn't do USB naturally. I could always network some machines and to the same trick but this was just so convenient.

There it is all put together. It got pretty crammed in there, but there is actually some empty space underneath the two purple plastic sliders. The case could be mounted with a slim style 3,5" floppy drive. Would require a different front assembly though.

It has one of these fancy GUI BIOS Setups. Just mouse around and do your thing... I actually remember this being something to brag about in the late 90's.

There are a lot of options from INSIDE including some optimistic clocking .. Better not jerk around too much here!

All go for boot.

The machine now sits on this desk / shelf (IKEA FTW) and you can see a 2-way KVM switch to the top right. I can switch between this PC and a Pentium 4 that sits on the floor. The screen in use is an LG Flatron L1730SF which also is a USB / Serial touch screen. Froody thing! Haven't tried that yet. The left screen is another 4:3 LCD and is not in use at the moment.

I am using my old 512MB mp3 player for file transfer. I still have the original software and it is the best USB drive I have ever tried on Windows 98se, it just works. Heck, I am seriously thinking about using this device again for music listening. It's so tiny and super easy to use while riding a bike as compared to the giant phones we all drag around today. Well, the grumpy old man syndrome came faster than expected.

So long, thanks for all the fish, any comments are welcome! Hope you liked it. Next up will probably be the Pentium 4 that does the rest of the work for me.

Nice, I love the "to hell with it, throw it in" mentality that results in builds like this. The black 5.25" floppy in that case is awesome.

That ESS Audiodrive is in the so-called PC/104 format BTW, those are hard to find! That format was mostly used in industrial controllers & embedded gear so multimedia / 'fun' peripherals weren't a priority. You can find other modules that "stack" on top of it, or even make a whole computer shaped like a big sandwich.

That's awesome! 😁
Some real nice handywork right there haha! 😁

It's strange to see that BIOS screen mentioning 200/66MHz 🤣. Iirc that BIOS wasn't very liked back then? But I kinda liked it anyhow. And it was back then the easiest way for me to test my serial mouses if they still worked or not. Can it also change colors? Maybe you have even more options? It had 4 different color patterns I think?

I don't know if more modern motherboard will not work with 360KB FDDs, but I can confirm that one of my A64 motherboards worked perfectly fine with a 2.88MB floppy drive (it's another odd format).

Btw, wouldn't it be interesting to see which motherboards work with what types of floppy drives? And especially the more recent motherboards?

Is it actually a hardware problem or is it software?

Thanks, you guys.

I have not succeeded in changing the color palettes of the BIOS, it does not mention it anywhere. Everything else seems so intuitive so I guess they didn't care for that specific option. It does however support a wide range of different COM protocols, and RS232 is the default. I can also adjust a lot of timings here and there. Also the board has an 8-pin connector where all pins are General Purpose I/O and can be set in BIOS to become Input of Output. Kinda like an Arduino of the long gone past? I suppose you would need some schematics and correct software for such.

The 360k floppy compatibility is indeed an interesting thing that could be investigated closer. I did notice that my ASUS x58 motherboard has the option (and physical connector) for 360k, 1.2M, 720k and 1.44M drives in BIOS. I have only tested 1.44 and in Windows 7 - that worked.
However as mentioned my P4, Piii and K8N Athlon 64 does not fare well with the 360k drive. Have not tested the 1.2M drive I also have in my collection. Also, I wonder if you had a modern system and actually got the mobo to talk with the 360k drive, how old would the OS have to be to be able to work with it?

DeafPK wrote:

Thanks, you guys. […]
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Thanks, you guys.

I have not succeeded in changing the color palettes of the BIOS, it does not mention it anywhere. Everything else seems so intuitive so I guess they didn't care for that specific option. It does however support a wide range of different COM protocols, and RS232 is the default. I can also adjust a lot of timings here and there. Also the board has an 8-pin connector where all pins are General Purpose I/O and can be set in BIOS to become Input of Output. Kinda like an Arduino of the long gone past? I suppose you would need some schematics and correct software for such.

The 360k floppy compatibility is indeed an interesting thing that could be investigated closer. I did notice that my ASUS x58 motherboard has the option (and physical connector) for 360k, 1.2M, 720k and 1.44M drives in BIOS. I have only tested 1.44 and in Windows 7 - that worked.
However as mentioned my P4, Piii and K8N Athlon 64 does not fare well with the 360k drive. Have not tested the 1.2M drive I also have in my collection. Also, I wonder if you had a modern system and actually got the mobo to talk with the 360k drive, how old would the OS have to be to be able to work with it?

Yw 😀

I think I used some floppy format program when running XP as XP by default could only format a limited number of different floppy disk formats? I was using Winimage version 4 (I figured out I could reset the trial from the resistry and version 4 worked..so I stuck with that one) but I did have a newer version of Winimage as well (version 8 iirc). There was some other programs that could reformat in odd formats, but most of those required at least some DOS.

My main reason for running these experiments on my (at the time most fastest) main rig (which was running XP) was to get my 2.88MB floppy drive working and it worked perfectly fine.
My Phenom II AM3 motherboard does in fact have an onboard floppy connector, but never attached a floppy drive to it.