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5.25 floppy drive to USB?

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macula

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Nov 29, 2009
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I have an Amstrad 1512DD in fine working condition, together with a pile of 360KB 5.25" floppy disks containing lots of vintage games, apps and my own teenage work.

I am seeking a way to connect a 5.25" drive to a USB port? Now being a Mac user with no PCs left at home :( I have no other way of porting my data on a hard disk.

Any ideas?

Thank you.
 
Try using an external USB floppy adapter. MAYBE it will support a 360K. OR you can use a USB to serial port adapter and "lap-link" the two computers and transfer files then. OR a parallel port floppy adapter.


macula said:
I have an Amstrad 1512DD in fine working condition, together with a pile of 360KB 5.25" floppy disks containing lots of vintage games, apps and my own teenage work.

I am seeking a way to connect a 5.25" drive to a USB port? Now being a Mac user with no PCs left at home :( I have no other way of porting my data on a hard disk.

Any ideas?

Thank you.
Click to expand...
 
macula said:
I have an Amstrad 1512DD in fine working condition, together with a pile of 360KB 5.25" floppy disks containing lots of vintage games, apps and my own teenage work.
Click to expand...

I would be happy to go through your floppies and extract all the data (especially the vintage games!!) off of them. I have many (ok too many) vintage machines with 360k drives, and I have an option board as well.

I offer this service free to anyone, as I am very interested in sourcing vintage games off floppies.

PM me and we can work out the details.

Alternately, are those 1512 upgradable? Is there an ISA slot?
 
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ISA slots on an Amstrad PC1512

ISA slots on an Amstrad PC1512

As far as I know, the Amstrad PC1512 has 3 x 8bit ISA slots.

Another transfer option to include in the list of possibles is the Iomega Parallel Port ZIP drive. A special driver is needed, but it does work.

Paul.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Do you know of such an animal? I've never seen one. All current USB floppies have the USB controller on the drive PCB fully integrated with the drive electronics.
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Yes, saw one on eBay. Shipped from China. I had no current need for it so passed. It was an adapter case, external power supply and empty box to hold a 1.44 with a ribbon cable inside with an adapter board.

I did buy the conversion kit for a HD, it works rather well.

It would be a whole lot easer to just use lap link. Use a USB serial port adapter on the Apple and straight serial into the xt compat. OR a straight parallel port lap link.
 
paul.brett said:
As far as I know, the Amstrad PC1512 has 3 x 8bit ISA slots.
Click to expand...

well heck, XTIDE to the rescue!
I know I sound like a salesperson trying to force an XTIDE controller down everyone's throat, but this would be a pretty easy, cheap and fun way of getting some storage (internal IDE hard drive) and removable access (removable CF device with a CF->IDE adapter) on a machine like this one.
 
My solution would be to get a working USB 3 1/2" floppy drive and hack it to work with whatever you want. 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" drives use the same BUS, so wiring shouldn't be too difficult. The only concern that I would have is how much current the 5 1/4" drive requires. You may need a seperate power supply for that, as I doubt that the USB port would put out enough current to drive it.
 
ZOBEX said:
Yes, saw one on eBay. Shipped from China. I had no current need for it so passed. It was an adapter case, external power supply and empty box to hold a 1.44 with a ribbon cable inside with an adapter board..
Click to expand...

Well there was some discussion a couple of years back on the FixUnix list about using a Buslink floppy box, but apparently the tests came up dry.

I suspect that any other drive probably uses the same SMSC converter chip.

I've checked all 13 pages of a "Floppy USB" search on eBay and come up with only the Buslink box. Any pointers to the Chinese unit would be appreciated.
 
are we going to have to do this ourselves then?

I've been playing with one of these jobbies at my workplace lately:
http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/EvaluationKits/FT2232H_MiniModule.htm

the FTDI software essentially gives you extremely easy access to wiggle all of those pins. So we'd have to emulate the way the controller works and pass all of the raw data back up to the host for decoding. doable? I've no idea-i've never worked with floppy controllers directly, but something like this module is both easy to work with from a "send some data over usb and watch it show up on the other end" and also would be easy for a hobbiest to attach/solder to the pins.
 
Another approach would be to install a network card in the Amstrad, either internally or parallel port if it has one. Then you could set up a FTP server on the Mac and transfer floppy by floppy to your current computer. It is only a matter to find the right network card which operates in a 8-bit slot. Perhaps I got lucky to find one on the first attempt. I still have another untested 16-bit card which I probably should see if I can get to work as well.
 
hargle said:
are we going to have to do this ourselves then?
Click to expand...

We are. I'm currently wrapping the second prototype (see Andrew's and my discussion in the Hardware thread). My first prototype used an ATMega128 uC running at 16 MHz to do the job. While it works, Andrew had reservations because of it being SMT and difficult for folks to assemble.

After some head-scratching, I decided to divide the tasks of drive management and the reading/writing. So the current version uses an ATTiny2313 to handle drive select, motor control and seeking and an ATMega162 to take care of the actual data transfer.

Rather than use an FTDI adapter (I do have some of those), it's more flexible to do the I/O as plain old RS232C serial and then use an inexpensive serial-to-USB adapter if needed (There's also a USB codebase for the AVR (V-USB) that would work if one wanted a pure USB device).

That way, you can hook the gizmo up to your vintage machine's serial port or your laptop's USB port. Data transfer uses Xmodem and is done a track at a time, Catweasel-style (i.e. time-domain samples) into a 128K buffer. If you want real data, the decoding is handled on whatever the host machine is (it's all 'C').

I've been waiting on parts; I finally have them, so I can get busy. Expect some news in about a month (holiday season makes time tight).

I've also been looking at the NXP Cortex uCs. They're cheaper than the AVRs (or PICs, for that matter), run at 50MHz using a 32-bit ARM core and some models come in PLCC.
 
Err, the xum1541 is more like an IEC interface for the USB bus, or even a parallel port interface. The 1541 is an intelligent, stand-alone floppy drive which you communicate with through a higher level serial (data, clock, attention) protocol. Besides it natively uses GCR encoding, so it won't be good to read old PC compatible floppy disks.

What Hargle and Chuck are up to seems more like a way to interface a lower level floppy disk controller to USB. Possibly parts of the project above could be used for inspiration if you don't know how to communicate with an USB device, but somehow I think that is not much of an issue here.
 
Chuck(G) said:
We are. I'm currently wrapping the second prototype (see Andrew's and my discussion in the Hardware thread). My first prototype used an ATMega128 uC running at 16 MHz to do the job. While it works, Andrew had reservations because of it being SMT and difficult for folks to assemble.

[snip]
Click to expand...

Hi! I am standing by to help out with the PCB layout and design.

Patience is important with homebrew projects since we all need to let the master (Chuck) work his magic. He is the brains in the outfit! When its ready, we'll make it happen. Sometimes it just takes time for projects to "soak" a bit before they are ready.

I much appreciate Chucks extra effort necessary to use PTH/DIP/PLCC parts. Using PTH is a huge design constraint in our SMT world but it lowers the barrier to entry for allow your average hobbyist to make the project using basic tools and simple skills. I think that is important.

Not having the right parts around always seems to hobble my projects especially connectors. I built one of those AT2XTKBD project PCBs and it looks fine but I am missing a couple pieces needed to finish it . You'd think with the piles of "stuff" here this wouldn't be a problem but it frequently causes delays. Fortunately there are local parts stores and Jameco is always a webpage away!

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch
 
carlsson said:
Err, the xum1541 is more like an IEC interface for the USB bus, or even a parallel port interface. The 1541 is an intelligent, stand-alone floppy drive which you communicate with through a higher level serial (data, clock, attention) protocol. Besides it natively uses GCR encoding, so it won't be good to read old PC compatible floppy disks.

What Hargle and Chuck are up to seems more like a way to interface a lower level floppy disk controller to USB. Possibly parts of the project above could be used for inspiration if you don't know how to communicate with an USB device, but somehow I think that is not much of an issue here.
Click to expand...

I think this may have already been done, leave it to the Chinese !!

http://www.tradevv.com/chinasupplie...-SHIMA-SEIKI-flat-knitting-machine-39250.html


http://www.tradevv.com/chinasupplie...oppy-Simulator-amp-USB-Driver-FUSB-11d71.html


One of these two will work as a direct drop in. THEN to run a USB all you will need is an 8bit floppy 1.44 adapter board for your XT. Am I wrong here ??
 
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You seem to be missing the point. The device (and you can even find it on eBay) essentially takes the floppy interface and either encodes or decodes to a "cooked" MFM interpretation. It has no flexibility regarding format or floppy encoding. i.e., 1.44M diskettes are represented by a file of 1,474,560 bytes. No ID address marks, nothing. Heaven help you if you've got a copy protected diskette.

While this might be okay for PC types, one might outfit their system with a CF-to-IDE controller or an CF reader.

We're after something more like a Catweasel--read anything, write anything, which is something no legacy solution can do.

If all we wanted to do was to just read ordinary MFM floppies, it'd be simplest just to buy a cheap SBC and hook a floppy to one end and a serial port to the other. Or go to your local thrift store or recyclers and pick up an old PC with a floppy drive...

There are commercial products that do exactly this--such as one of these. Originally used to replace paper tape readers on CNC and embroidery machines.

Andrew, I can see we're going to have a tough time selling this thing...
 
Honestly there seems to be a lot of things going on at the same time.

1. OP has a bunch of 5.25" floppies from an Amstrad, PC compatible which need to be backed up. The only modern computer available would be a Mac, which itself tends to be foreign territory to many of us.

2. First suggestion was to get an XT-IDE interface and install in the Amstrad. It would help backing up the floppies to a regular IDE hard drive or even memory card.

3. Second (my) suggestion was to get a network card and install in the Amstrad, to be able to upload floppies to a local FTP server running on the Mac.

4. Third suggestion is to construct an interface (controller) which lets you connect a 5.25" floppy drive and in the other end has a USB connection to a modern computer. This controller would ideally be fully programmable so you can read or write any kind of 5.25" floppy disk, not only from a PC compatible but also other systems.

5. Fourth suggestion (Zobex) seems to be the other way around, a USB interface which you plug into the floppy drive controller on the Amstrad and run some USB memory or whatever as a virtual floppy disk. I don't know if this Amstrad computer supports more than one floppy disk at a time, but for this practical purpose it would seem an IDE interface plays the same role.

It is possible even I got confused and misunderstood some people. Although the OP asked for a 5.25" floppy drive controller for USB, which also is what Hargle, Chuck and Andrew are tooling with, for the moment being there seems to exist other solutions to the original problem: a pile of floppy disks to be backed up. The simplest solution would be to send them to another fellow who already has a working floppy drive and means to store and send back the data, but why settle for something simple and lazy when you can get an advanced solution which also will come handy when the OP in three months from now will discover another 100 floppy disks hidden in a cupboard? :-D
 
Well like it was posted, orginally this thread started out trying to move files from the 360k floppies to the Apple. There are any number of ways to do that. I can't imagine what use an XT would have writing to files on any floppy outside of the DOS standard of 360-720-1.2-1.44 . That can as we have seen, by SCSI, parallel port and now via a smart USB interface. All relating to the original basic IBM XT of this sub forum. I am quite excitied to find that not only will my 4.77hmz XT run an IDE hd now but will, it looks like, support a USB thumb drive. While that exercise has absolutely no value in todays world, it's an exercise in, can it be done.

I spent a week getting a 486-66 to run 98SE. Even running 98Lite, it was a dog getting onto the internet. I can see now that a 8mhz 8088 running a USB drive might make a simple web server but again, that is only a test to see if it can be done. One thing grows out of another.

This weekend I guess I will get started using the NOS Jameco XT fliptop case found at a garage sale. Found a 8mhz V-20 board and a 1.44 floppy adapter. Now if China will sell a single unit of the USB adapter I can make a DOS or UNIX or Linux system with no moving drive ?!?!

Is it needed? no but an experiment in what can be done.

Z
 
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