First post, by shock__
- Rank
- Oldbie
So let's be honest here, as much as floppies are part of the retro charme, just as much do they suck (by now). While loud and slow drives, along with the joy of spending hors with swapping physical medias, can be beared with, those can be quite a pain, as they slowly but certainly seem to reach their end of lifetime by now (strangely enough, the older the media, the higher their reliability), as I experienced when I was writing back my Windows 3.11 images, which took me 15 attempts, which is bad but not unbearable yet, considering the OS just takes 8 floppies.
So recently I've kept asking myself, why not stick with emulation or use something based upon a more modern media?
Searching a bit on the internet, I seem to have finally found a suitable standalone solution, which also appears to be transparent enough as a swap-in replacement. This thing being the HxC2001 Floppy Emulator (the SD-card based standalone version, rather than the USB based one, which needs a modern computer as a "server"). Link here
I don't wanna get into too many details, as first I don't own such a thing and second most info is on the website anyways. Basically it takes custom pre-converted images in it's own format (the tool can convert .img along with various other formats, for pretty much every other computer/synthesizer which had a floppy drive) on an SD card, which are mounted on the device using 3 buttons and a LCD driven menu.
So my question is ... does anyone of you guys here have experience with this (or a similar solution, considering there are quite a few projects based upon this one)? I'd love to build/buy one, but I don't wanna spend $60-$90 for something that doesn't work reliably in the end. At very least it does seem quite promising at this point.