Spiffles wrote on 2020-10-17, 15:26:
Hey guys, having the same conundrum here. I'd like to build a system that has support for most of the popular and less popular storage media, and I realized the 5,25'' floppy drive is going to be the limiting factor on the system's age. So a Pentium 4 motherboard, aye? I also need it to take an IDE Zip drive and a SCSI controller card into which a 3,5'' magnetooptical drive would be hooked.
Anyway, this guy is using a Core 2 Duo motherboard and has a 5,25'' floppy drive working with no special drivers or adapters, though he doesn't simulatenously have a 3,5'' floppy drive in the PC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=footqrNHfp4&t … channel=Jrcraft
I have an ASRock 980DE3/U3S3 (ATX) which I believe is the most "modern" (still a stretch) motherboard with an onboard floppy controller. It can take an AMD FX-8350, which I have, and 32GB DDR3 RAM.
Like most later boards with onboard floppy it can only control a single drive. I'm using a 1.44MB. The BIOS also has support for 5 1/4" 360K and 1.2MB but I've never actually tested one with it. Some people have explored boards to see whether the single-floppy issue is a bios limitation or hardware one. On this board, it is a hardware one as even with Linux (which lets you override the floppy info in the CMOS) it doesn't do anything when you access the second drive.
There are adapter cables out there with usb on one end and a connector for an *internal* 3 1/2" floppy on the other. You might use that, in addition to a "real" 5 1/4" drive, so that you could have both internal drives on one machine.
I believe the reason for no PCI floppy controllers is that even if one existed, it wouldn't be a drop-in replacement for DOS compatibility due to needing to emulate ISA DMA--same reason why PCI sound cards have tricky DOS SoundBlaster emulation.
I wonder if, someday, people could hook a floppy controller to the TPM header on a modern motherboard, as I believe that just connects to the LPC bus (software compat with ISA) and there are some POST code cards that connect to that for this reason.
