I was not able to reliably get the contents of my floppies imaged (non copy protected)

Not all USB floppies are created equal. The key to getting a good one is making sure at a minimum it supports both 720 and 1.44. When I bought my USB floppy many years ago from CompUSA all the USB floppies were quality. Not so much anymore.

This is the one I got, while it doesn't say 720k on the package the DX-EF101 model does support it. It's been solid for at least a decade despite me treating it with little respect...

https://www.amazon.com/Dynex-External-Floppy- … 05826548&sr=8-1

They can be found cheaper on fleabay.

DosFreak wrote on 2020-11-19, 15:44:

Not sure if such a discussion would go over well on these forums. The apple mentality is to throw away and it's only gotten worse. As long as there are options (throw away hardware and upgradeable) then it's all good.

Apple was first to get rid of the floppy drive in 1998 but floppies are still used today, it's good to have options.

I don't think it's about "elegance". To me, it's more about "control".

AFAIK, Intel already offers CPU+GPU+PCH packages. Let Intel add MEM to that and we now have a complete PC on a single die. What do we know what they put in the package once that happens? Look at how "Unified Memory Architecture" has security enclave and machine leaning accelerator embedded. It's already more than obscure enough, and I wonder if Intel and AMD would not be dripping saliva to the floor.

BTW, I'm not trying to flame Apple exterminated floppy drive and there wasn't an option. I thought iMac was sexy without floppy drive sticking out. 😐

Errius wrote on 2020-11-19, 22:32:

What is the problem with USB floppy drives? They can't handle exotic copy protected disks?

Most can't even handle Double Density disks.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-11-19, 18:41:

You are obviously storing your floppy disks lncorrectly in a dusty area.

Maybe, but the truth is that we (me and my dad) actually don’t care about them or their content. The majority of them are in my dad’s office, so don’t worry if one day they disappear, it will most certainly be my mother to blame for it. =P A few ones I saved are in another plastic box in my room. For the record, I saved six Windows 3.1 disks, but some are dead. There are others.

Here’s a photo of my Windows disks, straight out of my Instagram. Probably 2019.

Why don't just get rid of them then? If they are faulty or of no use for goodness sake and stop moaning. I have my original Windows 3.1 disk and they still work perfectly.

Maybe, but the truth is that we (me and my dad) actually don’t care about them or their content.

I used to have the same attitude. Now I curse myself for losing all the images and code I made when I was a kid. I would give anything to get that stuff back but it's gone for ever.

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-11-20, 05:01:

Why don't just get rid of them then? If they are faulty or of no use for goodness sake and stop moaning. I have my original Windows 3.1 disk and they still work perfectly.

My thoughts exactly. 😉

Back when floppies were still used en masse, in the nineties, I found them notoriously unreliable. To be honest, I didn't have many "original", factory-made floppies, because I wasn't buying games back then. Most of what I had was driver / software disks that came with various hardware, some antivirus definitions (I actually had a Norton subscription for a couple of years).

So 95%+ of floppies that went through my hands were store-bought blanks that I used to share games with friends (the issue of legality did not cross our minds back then), move work-related documents between home PC and office/school PCs, create boot disks when they were needed and sometimes to make backups. And a lot of those floppies would just stop working out of the blue, claiming they were bad (or had some bad sectors). Way too often they would complain something like "track 0 bad, disk unusable" even before the floppy was used for the first time.

I suspect I may have been buying low-quality brands, and maybe some of my floppy drives were also generic crap. I didn't know back then that these things can make a difference, so in my mind - floppies are just useless crap - unreliable, extremely low capacity for the physical size and awfully slow. Once I got my first CD burner, I never looked back, and started using CD-R/RW (later DVD-R / DVD-RAM) for all my archival purposes. At that point you no longer needed boot disks as you could just boot OS installations off the CDs, and shortly after PCs introduced booting from USB media as well.

I think I stopped keeping anything of importance on floppy drives years ago. Even for the installation media for DOS/Win3.x era software, which originally came on multiple floppies - I copied all of the floppies to my hard drive, then burnt them on CDs for backup. If I ever needed to install something like Windows 3.11 or MS Office for Windows 3.11 - I would just run the installation from the hard drive. Not only I don't have to deal with constantly swapping fragile easy-to-destroy media, it is also an order of magnitude faster.

When I started buying physical copies of games - everyone moved to CDs already. My earliest games were actually promotional copies sent on CDs with the video game magazine I was subscribed to. Much later I got into the hobby of buying retro games, but I have never bought anything on floppies, and don't think I ever will - no matter how good the game is. It's CD/DVD or nothing for me.

Whew, that was a long and off-topic rant. Maybe it's time to split part of the floppy discussion into its own thread. Mods/admins, what say you?

About my disks, I wasn’t moaning...

Dosbox-X should run well on M1 macs. The only thing left to fix is the dynamic core, says the dev

Yes, the dynamic core is the big hurdle and a lot of security flags it raises in Apple's security

3M and Dysan disks seem to be pretty reliable.

How to test if a USB floppy drive is fully compatible with 720 disks? Just put one in and read it, or do you need to format it a few times to be sure?

Also: Do modern Windows versions still support DD disks? You have to be sure you're using a compatible OS.

Errius wrote on 2020-11-22, 15:00:

How to test if a USB floppy drive is fully compatible with 720 disks? Just put one in and read it, or do you need to format it a few times to be sure?

Just try to format it once as 720K, if it's not compatible you'll get an obvious error, I don't remember exactly the wording but it says something like "format not supported"

Errius wrote on 2020-11-22, 15:00:

Also: Do modern Windows versions still support DD disks? You have to be sure you're using a compatible OS.

Yes, even latest windows 10

Dominus wrote on 2020-11-22, 14:34:

Yes, the dynamic core is the big hurdle and a lot of security flags it raises in Apple's security

If they manage to overcome this, and fix the issues Windows 98 has with the dynamic core, I can only imagine how good Windows 98 on Dosbox-x will be. Also need (even the intel version needs) faster Voodoo emulation. Then I’d definitely kick the butt of VMware out of my mac.

For now I am using VMware for the occasional 3D gaming/direct3d acceleration and QEMU for the other vast majority of my retro gaming. There are only four games needing it: XP VM, with FIFA 98 & 99, CS 1.6, Flight Simulator 98 and Grand Prix 4. The first three could benefit from that but I can live without GP4 (I have the previous versions) unless QEMU ups their game and gives 3D acceleration out of the box (unlikely).

I believe that with the M1 Macs, QEMU is missing a big opportunity. The emulation is faster now, and being a free solution makes it an interesting choice instead of VMware and Parallels, which are paid virtualization choices. Give it a gui (which UTM now does) and it only needs direct3d acceleration to take the fight. But they (QEMU devs) are missing it and not working together...

Rumor has it that leaked benchmarks suggests that Apple M1 SoC beats the 11th-gen Intel i7.

The day I was hoping for finally arrived. The start of the end for Intel. Can’t wait for the Apple M2 next. It will be incredibly fun. I can only think of an Avengers scene where Hulk beats Loki repeatedly 😂

RUMOR wtf!! 🤣!!!

You really are a funny fellow 🤣!

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-11-23, 06:38:

RUMOR wtf!! 🤣!!!

You really are a funny fellow 🤣!

https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-m1-appea … eaked-benchmark

Regarding DOSBox-X dynamic core: https://twitter.com/greatcodeholio/status/133 … 2097014784?s=20

Great news. Now the only thing left (which has nothing to do with Mac) is to make Windows 98 run better with dynamic core on DOSBox.

Bruninho wrote on 2020-11-23, 12:26:

Caluser2000 wrote on 2020-11-23, 06:38:

RUMOR wtf!! 🤣!!!

You really are a funny fellow 🤣!

https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-m1-appea … eaked-benchmark

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4306696
4 cores

robertmo, please no nonsense postings