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Flagstaff Engineering 8 Inch Floppy Controller

bolex

bolex

Experienced Member
Joined
Feb 6, 2021
Messages
433
Location
Utah
I've had a flagstaff controller for some time, but I never could figure out how to get it to work because I was lacking a manual. I took a chance on something I saw on eBay and thought that it might be the manual I was looking for. I got lucky and not only was it the manual but it included multiple 360K floppies with drivers, applications and conversion tools. Many of these are on retroarchive.org, but they do not have a manual.

I made a pretty quick PDF of the manual and uploaded it along with images of the floppies.

It can be downloaded here for now. Hopefully I can find a better place to share going forward. https://www.buildyourbox.com/Flagstaff_Floppy_Man.zip

The controller, driver and conversion tools are pretty interesting. I like how you can load a table of drive parameters into the driver to define virtual floppy drives. You can have one floppy drive (drive D: for example) be an 8" 128 byte/sector drive and Drive E can be an 8" 1024 byte/sector even though they're both the same physical drive.

I'm going to try to get my card up and running in the next few weeks but I thought I would share the manual.
 
Sorry to bump this thread, but I finally had some time to do some post-processing on the flagstaff manual. I've updated the link with a new PDF. The 186 page manual is now just 3MB in size and much more presentable.

https://www.buildyourbox.com/Flagstaff_Floppy_Man.zip

Feel free to distribute and add to any archive that you feel may benefit from having the driver and manual.
 
Too bad that the manual doesn't have any low-level technical information. It seems that there are two varieties of these, the -S and the -D, only one of which is nominally compatible with the PC BIOS.
 
I believe what you have was made to convert IBM System/36 5 1/4 diskettes between 8 inch diskettes.

Track 1 of the 8 inch diskettes is formatted 26 128 byte sectors and 76 tracks with 8 1024 byte sectors.

The 5 1/4 track 1 is 26 sectors with 256 bytes per sector. The other 76 tracks are the same as an 8 inch.

It’s does require that the driver be loaded.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Too bad that the manual doesn't have any low-level technical information. It seems that there are two varieties of these, the -S and the -D, only one of which is nominally compatible with the PC BIOS.
Click to expand...

It is too bad. The manual also mentions a 9.1 board. The board I have is version 9.2. The latest driver that I found on retroarchive here: http://www.retroarchive.org/maslin/disks/flagstaf/index.html
is called V10DISK.SYS, which makes me think there was also a version 10 of the board.
 
I know this is an old thread, but I did find this picture of this manual that I do not have. If anyone has this manual, please let me know. I'd love to get a copy. I think this may answer a few questions that I have about cabling.


flagstaff-engineering-floppy-disk_1_450d0c3196333c92d1450bae74dd0205.jpg
 
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