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RetroJoe

Senior Member

Joined: 06/08/2020
Location: Canada
Posts: 290

Posted: 09:53pm 19 Sep 2022

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It's been a long time since I posted on TBS, but lurk every week or so to check in on developments. I even have have a few Picos in my parts drawer, and am hoping to build a Picomite VGA in the not-too-distant future.

Regarding the CMM2 and William's recent post, I guess I am one of the "guilty as charged" retro PC guys who discovered the CMM2 in the height of the lockdown, and have slowly wandered away.

But, I am not too far away, spiritually or "BASICally"- my current project is an "Altair Arduino" using the Arduino Due and a bunch of FOSS. In fact, the creator of the project, David Hansel, name-checks Geoff and his ASCII video terminal, having originally used it to front-end his Altair emulator then using it for design inspiration to build a clone of the Cromemco Dazzler, arguably the first "GPU card" for personal computers, as the Altair was defacto the first mass-market PC.

I've found a cute-as-a-button case to put my own clone in, so I'll post photos once I'm done with wiring up all the blinking lights and front-panel switches. The first "tabula rasa" one is below :)

OK, now for the retro "ask". As luck would have it, I work in North America for an Australian company, and my colleague in Sydney (Jason) recently asked me if I could pull files off a 5.25 floppy for him.

The answer is "yes", but rather than snail mail, I thought I would ask the (Oz-centric) TBS community if anyone living near Sydney would be willing and able to spend an hour or so with Jason and transfer the files to a USB drive. I can do the rest - Jason's goal is to resurrect the 40 year old application in DOS BOX or equivalent.

Please let me know ASAP, and I'll take it from there.

Happy Shedding !!

Edited 2022-09-20 07:56 by RetroJoe
Enjoy Every Sandwich / Joe P.

Quazee137

Guru

Joined: 07/08/2016
Location: United States
Posts: 593

Posted: 03:46am 20 Sep 2022

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have them check out this

USB 5.25 Floppy

and

reading floppies

hope this helps

Quazee137

tgerbic
Regular Member

Joined: 25/07/2019
Location: United States
Posts: 65

Posted: 04:50am 20 Sep 2022

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Unfortunately that link is for a 3.5" USB drive.

I spent some time early last year looking for a 5.25" USB drive to attach to a laptop and could not find one anywhere. I ended up buying a FC5025 USB 5.25 Floppy Controller from Device Side Data. With this, I can read a variety of different format 5.25 floppies. The restriction is it cannot write to a floppy, but for what I needed at the time, it got the job done.

I still had an XP with 3.5 and 5.25 drives in it, and have a USB 3.5" external drive, so I am covered for most needs. Really comes in handy for reading/writing HP LIF formatted disks. Since this was a bit of a wake-up call to do something serious about now and future floppy disk reading and writing problems I built up two older PCs for floppy work, one with multiboot DOS and one with Fedora 28 32-bit.

As time passes, reading old floppy disks is becoming quite a problem, especially since modern mother boards no longer have floppy support hardware and BIOS support for floppy disks. I have also heard people having trouble finding 5.25 drives that still work.

Good luck and I think the FC5025 is going to be the best bet, outside of building up an old PC, or having a friend with a working old PC.

Quazee137

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Joined: 07/08/2016
Location: United States
Posts: 593

Posted: 06:20am 21 Sep 2022

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well that link wasn't the one I meant to use try this one.

USB to 5.25 floppy

I copied the wrong link in the my list.

Now I hope this helps.

Quazee137

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