But why would you expect a PCI floppy controller to be any more "real" than a USB floppy controller, if there's even one out there?

If a Catweasel isn't an option, are you aware of the Kryoflux?
http://www.kryoflux.com/

maybe because pci hdd cards have there own bios and dos sees the drives on it no differently than any other hdd
so he hopes pci floppy controllers would be the same

Zup wrote:

Now that it seems that floppy drivers are rarer and rarer, most motherboards are removing floppy connectors.

Are there any PCI card with a floppy controller? I've googling around and I haven't found anything like that.

USB floppy doesn't work well for some uses (i.e.: dump some disk images into real floppies, or pure DOS floppy use), in fact some programs like samdisk or cpcdiskxp require a "real" floppy controller.

The problem is, PCI is being phased out also 😵

I seem to recall there were a few SCSI based floppy drives out there, may have been popular on the MAC platform I take it.

Any chance these would work ?

No, the question is that some programs (specially those related to retro disk images) expects or needs access to a "real" Nec 765 FDC. It is not a BIOS related problem.

A USB floppy works well if disk images are "standard" disk images (i.e.: 80 tracks x 18 sectors x 2 sides, or anything you may dump via dd), but won't work if you're trying to dump images with mixed sized sectors in the same track (i.e.: a track with 7 sectors of 512 bytes and 1 sector of 1024 bytes).

I don't know if SCSI floppy drives would handle that, but SCSI is also being phased out (everything new is SAS) and SCSI floppy drives won't help the missing 765 problem.

isn't it enough to make images from all floppies and use them with HxC Floppy Emulator on old computers, and in some software floppy emulator on a modern pc? and abandon real floppies at all?

Sure, but you've got to make the floppy images somehow first.

pcs with floppy drive are not that rare all over the world 😉

To image the floppies an USB one should be good enough, right?

just get to some old computer with real floppy controller (lot's of that cheap crap everywhere) i guess you can even buy one at the price of usb floppy 😉 (and sell it when imaging is done) 😉 (if somehow you no longer have any of your old pc from last 20 years 😉

The floppy controller uses ISA DMA. Is it possible for PCI cards to utilize ISA DMA? I know that PCI sound cards can't be compatible to an ISA sound blaster but I don't know if ISA DMA is the reason for this.
(Of course the controller could implement PCI bus mastering but the question was if it is compatible on the software side.)

Dominus wrote:

To image the floppies an USB one should be good enough, right?

Yes!

For example you can image the boot disk images from bootdisk.com onto a USB Floppy drive.

I have ordered one of these cheaper floppy emulators on eBay and will check it out soon. I'll post it on this website but will only look into the PC side of things (no Amiga and things like that).

I had 7 USB floppy drives. Now i have only two. Really good stuff. No drives needed from win 98 to win 7.

Several minutes says ISA only.

Thanks for resurrecting my thread, but USB drives are useless for me.

The main goal is use Samdisk or CPCdiskXP (both use fdrawcmd.sys) to export disk images to 3.5 real disks.

Most of those images use:
a) Abnormal sector numbering. That was a "feature" of standard Spectrum and CPC disks (with sector numbering starting in 0xC0).
b) Non-standard size sectors. As a protection, some images included "big" sectors (up to 8192 bytes); in Dragon computers the "standard" sector size is 256 bytes/sector.
c) Missing tracks, missing sectors, non-consecutive sector numbering... those things to make FDC life interesting.

Most (if not all) USB floppy drives only admit two formats: 80 tracks*2 heads*9 sectors, with 512 bytes/sector and sector count starting at 0 (720Kb) or 80*2*18 with same sector parameters (1440Kb), so they're useless when dealing with non-PC formats.

There are a number of special solutions (Kryo Flux, Catweasel), but they're too expensive.

I see.

Well some mainboards still come with the FDD controller. I know Asrock have a few.

is USB drives unable to accept weird formated (but DOS compatible) disk, that created using 2MF ?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)

Edit: fixed as the url tag can't accept if it contain '(' or ')'

Has anyone tried something like this:
http://www.arstech.com/item-USB-2-0-to-ISA-ca … S-usb2isar.html

USB ISA slot, interesting concept.

Just an obeservation that I have : I have those "IBM" printed USB floppy drives.

I've seen in quite a number of occasions, they either destroy parts of the floppy's sectors or when written using these USB drives, they become unreadable when I use the written floppies on a system with actual floppy drives, like my dos machines.

I started resorting to writing floppies using an actual floppy drive from my WinXP system when downloading some files to write and use in my dos machines.