brostenen wrote:NamelessPlayer wrote:TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:In 30 years time I doubt there will be any working floppies left to read anyways.
Which is why I find it imperative to back up the floppies/Zip disks/etc. we've got before they rot out into uselessness.
Sure, most of the disks I have are probably backed up on the usual sites somewhere, but I don't know for sure. Better safe than sorry in that respect.
I find it more fair to ask, if there are any hardware left that uses floppy disks or are there any floppy disks left for hardware that use it? Wich is it, that dies first? Someone might start producing floppy disks or drives again, at that time, using some sort of crowd funding. Much like those C64/A1200 cases.
Honestly, for older computers, I think floppy drive emulators are the way to go - if there are working images of the floppy disks needed to use in them to begin with.
That's the dilemma right there - it's unlikely that every single software floppy disk out there has been backed up to a drive image workable in such an emulator, and as such, measures need to be taken before they're lost forever.
cyclone3d wrote:There are floppy emulators for PCs. Cost is around $20 a piece. You use a USB stick and software that comes with it in order to […]
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There are floppy emulators for PCs. Cost is around $20 a piece. You use a USB stick and software that comes with it in order to make the separate floppy folders. Some support up to 999 floppies on one thumb drive.
And look, here is somebody who sells a mac disk emulator... does both floppy and HDD images.
https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/
Edit: will this drive work for backing up the floppies?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Panasonic-JU-268A016C … c-/132294492359
Looks like the other option is to add a USB card to the 6500 and just use a USB floppy drive.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1796395?tstart=0
PC floppy drives, including all of the USB ones, do not read Mac 400K/800K floppies. Those were made possible due to a variable-speed design feature of the Macintosh floppy drive controller, where PC drives could only store 720K on a DSDD disk. As a result, the only method I know of to archive those disks is to image them using a suitable vintage Mac, then transfer the images to a more modern system.
Otherwise, I would've taken the USB floppy drive route by now. I do have a USB + FW + ATA-133 card in the 6500, but I would probably just use the iMac G3 or MDD G4 instead if the USB approach was viable.
Because I have a mix of DD 800K and HD 1.44MB disks to deal with here, whatever I do has to work with both of these.
Remember that the goal here is archival of existing floppies, where the Mac floppy emulator is of no use (though it might come in handy for the IIcx later if I can't boot off of the SCSI HDD for any reason).
Your eBay listing pointed me in the right direction, though! They're cheap enough that I could order one right now, though I'll have to do a bit more research if I want to go with a Mitsubishi drive identical to what was pre-installed in this 6500, or opt for a Panasonic or Sony drive instead.