laxdragon wrote:

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.

That has come up on occasion many times over the years. No one appears to have ever done anything useful with it.

My main interest in such a device is to have a 5.25" USB floppy. $149 is more than I am willing to part with to make it a reality.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ars-Technology-USB-to … =item4ac4248cf0

Are you sure? I remember writing some weird format discs with Floppy Image writer. How can i test this?

[Edit] Tried with CMD format tool, it was unable to format 720K.

Zup wrote:

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

The main goal is use [urr=http://simonowen.com/samdisk/]Samdisk[/url] 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.

Still looking for that damn thing...

It seems that there were almost no "multi-io" pci cards (it seems that multi-io means parallel/serial now), but I've found that there were some SCSI cards with floppy controllers (AHA1542, but it is an ISA card). It's overkill, but may worth looking at.

It seems that BT-946C chipset supported floppy controller, but I'm unable to find any card that implemented that. Adaptec made some models with floppy controller, but I've only found ISA, VLB and EISA cards (no PCI).