Have you found a PCI floppy controller? Where? 😁

keropi wrote:

Have you found a PCI floppy controller? Where? 😁

I'm also interested in getting one of those...

"Catweasel is a universal PCI floppy disk controller that uses unmodified PC diskdrives."

So it possible try pci to pcie adapters and Catweasel... I'm sure not that its will work good. Especially with bootable disks, or with newest os as Vista+.

Or better find some asrock mobo with floppy connector. My asrock 1155 mobo have it.

AFAIK the catweasel needs drivers to function and you can't boot from it because of that. It is not a normal FDC, it was a solution to read/write amiga and other non Fat formatted floppies under windows.

good luck getting a catweasel - even if you find one it will be something like 300~500e

asrock tip was good - what mobo model is it?

My mobo is z68 pro3 m.
But there also was mobos for other cpus - lga775 and am3...

The AsRock am3+ 990FX Extreme 4 takes Fx-8370 and below cpu's and has a floppy/ide controller. Was my primary rig until this x58 and Xeon fell into my lap.

I could be wrong, but I believe the Standard FDC was somehow tied to the ISA bus (including Super I/O and LPC bus).
With the help of extra drivers and/or EMM386 other controllers could work in DOS or Win9x, however.
External SCSI floppy drives were the only other alternative besides USB drives and the Catweasels that I've seen so far.
Except for 3.5" 1.44MB drives, maybe. The LS120 has an IDE connector and can read/write standard floppies.

MERCURY127 wrote:

"Catweasel is a universal PCI floppy disk controller that uses unmodified PC diskdrives."

So it possible try pci to pcie adapters and Catweasel... I'm sure not that its will work good. Especially with bootable disks, or with newest os as Vista+.

Or better find some asrock mobo with floppy connector. My asrock 1155 mobo have it.

Mine Asrock Z77 extreme 6 is the last board with a floppy drive connector, due it only will support 3,5 inch 1.44MB drives only. 5.25 isnt supported.

If the board supports UEFI bios, then it doesnt have support for 5.25 inch drives. Because thats never implementend in UEFI.

why not a usb floppy drive?

I have tried an USB floppy drive.. Technically it did work different.. Seems they are buffering them self. When you want to read a new floppy the old data sometimes stays in that buffer.. USB drives are unreliable. IDE drives wont..

That sounds like faulty or cheap modern USB floppy drive to me. I have old Teac, NEC and iomega USB floppy drives and never saw anything similar, and I wrote a number of 1.44, 720 and Mac floppies on those.

If you want to use 5.25 drives at least you should look for Pentium 4 or an Athlon XP motherboard. Most of them should still support 5.25 inch drives.

emosun wrote:

why not a usb floppy drive?

I've got a Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3 and an Amstrad CPC 6128. Both have a 765 floppy disk controller connected to a 3 inch floppy disk, but can be converted or use an external 3.5 inch floppy.

The "standard" format for a ZX Spectrum +3 is one side, 40 tracks (starting at 0) and nine 512 byte sectors starting at 0xC0 (instead of being sector 0, sector 1... they are sector 0xC0, 0xC1...), not to mention "special" formats used in games that have bigger sector size or missing sectors.

Floppy USB drives only support standard PC formats, usually 2 sides, 80 tracks and nine or eighteen 512 byte sectors starting at 0 (and even some chinese drives support 18 sectors only), so they won't create floppies usable on those computers. (Note that some boot PC games used also protections based on sector size, missing sectors ant those things)

I compiled a list of PCI multi I/O cards that had floppy disk controllers, but I haven't seen one of those.

With floppy controller: - GIGABYTE GA-107 - GIGABYTE GA-108 - SUNIX 5249P - TYAN S1363-004 - TYAN S1366 […]
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With floppy controller:
- GIGABYTE GA-107
- GIGABYTE GA-108
- SUNIX 5249P
- TYAN S1363-004
- TYAN S1366

May have a floppy controller, but not sure:
- Gigabyte GA-410

I hope that this controllers use the same ports as integrated floppy controllers, and that they support strange formats. Have anyone tried one of those?

PCIe > PCI > ISA

http://www.costronic.com/Ev72p.htm

May work. 😉

Zup wrote:

Floppy USB drives only support standard PC formats, usually 2 sides, 80 tracks and nine or eighteen 512 byte sectors starting at 0 (and even some chinese drives support 18 sectors only), so they won't create floppies usable on those computers.

I'm using my USB Teac to create floppies readable on CPC6128 with external 3.5" drive. In fact, I copy 3" disk images to real disks this way (writing the .DSK on 3.5" floppy in USB drive, then putting the floppy into 3.5" drive connected to CPC.
However, I do agree that copy protection might not work with USB floppy drives.

The LS120 IDE and SCSI Drives do support reading and writing standard floppy disks

Jo22 wrote on 2017-12-17, 02:17:

I could be wrong, but I believe the Standard FDC was somehow tied to the ISA bus (including Super I/O and LPC bus). With the hel […]
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I could be wrong, but I believe the Standard FDC was somehow tied to the ISA bus (including Super I/O and LPC bus).
With the help of extra drivers and/or EMM386 other controllers could work in DOS or Win9x, however.
External SCSI floppy drives were the only other alternative besides USB drives and the Catweasels that I've seen so far.
Except for 3.5" 1.44MB drives, maybe. The LS120 has an IDE connector and can read/write standard floppies.

USB floppy drives work fine unless u have a bad one.

It's so much cheaper and easier to just take a low-grade P3/p4 board and use it as a "tweener".

i've been down this road several times. Make an XP32 rig, and load it with all the floppy drives you have. save yourself the headache.