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new old stock ISA Floppy card

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mark0x01

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Oct 31, 2015
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Kaiapoi, New Zealand
Discussing your hobby sometimes pays dividends.
When buying some components at the local electronic parts store, and mentioning I was rebuilding a vintage computer, I was offered a "new in box" Longshine LCS-6610F ISA Floppy disk adapter (Rev W1) for NZ$11.50
It uses the SMC FDC37C65 chipset, has a bios and supports the usual 360k to 1.44mb drives and having two crystals installed, it should offer ta good range of drive support.

I did find mention when digging for info on the controller, that the chipset may support 2.88mb.

I'll run the ImageDisk fdctest on it at some stage and see how it goes.

With any luck, it should support 8" drives as well.
I did use a PC many years ago, to transfer data to 8" for an IBM payroll system.
I think it had a dedicated 8" controller and software.
 
Since when do floppy controllers need to support 8" drives? Every controller that can do 5.25" HD can do 8" as well, as there is no difference between them from what the controller sees. All you need is a passive adapter for the connector.
 
All IBM PC controllers lack the TG43 line that earlier 8" drives require for writing.

Some IBM PC controllers lack support for FM encoding and high density 128 sector support, which were common on 8" formats.

Prior to the release of the IBM AT, some vendors did make high density floppy controllers specifically to support 8" disk drives.
 
But that is very specific. Generally, no special support is needed to run an 8" drive on a PC floppy controller (ignoring an actual use-case, like dumping some weird CP/M disks or something like that). Also, lacking support for FM would render 5.25" SD disks unreadable as well, so that's not 8"-related.
 
mark0x01 said:
Discussing your hobby sometimes pays dividends.
When buying some components at the local electronic parts store, and mentioning I was rebuilding a vintage computer, I was offered a "new in box" Longshine LCS-6610F ISA Floppy disk adapter (Rev W1) for NZ$11.50
It uses the SMC FDC37C65 chipset, has a bios and supports the usual 360k to 1.44mb drives and having two crystals installed, it should offer ta good range of drive support.

I did find mention when digging for info on the controller, that the chipset may support 2.88mb.

I'll run the ImageDisk fdctest on it at some stage and see how it goes.

With any luck, it should support 8" drives as well.
I did use a PC many years ago, to transfer data to 8" for an IBM payroll system.
I think it had a dedicated 8" controller and software.
Click to expand...
Pictures please!
 
The TG43 signal is easily synthesized using a very common DBit 34-to-50 pin adapter. Details here.
The 37C65 is an earlier FDC developed and licensed by Western Digital. It does require two crystals for operation--a 9.6MHz one for 300K used on 5.25" HD drives for "360KB" support and a 16MHz one for 250/500K support for the remainder. Later FDCs used a single 24MHz crystal to get both data rates.
I've still got a tube of the things around here somewhere, as well as the original WD "prototype" cards and a WD1002FOX controller. Not the best of the FDCs, but it will work for many things.
 
jafir said:
Is it the same board layout as the one I posted here, only with a different chip?
Click to expand...
Very different, this thread shows a picture of the W1 revision board.
There are multiple revisions, using different controller chips and even looking very different.

Additional bonus was it came with a cable with 3 x 34pin edge connectors.
I wanted to buy some to make up a cable, but they were out of stock, so now I can add a header to it and make the cable I needed as well.
 
I’m referring to the the one that I posted, at the end of the thread. It says W1on the silkscreen. The only reason I question it is the mention of a different chip.
 
mark0x01 said:
Discussing your hobby sometimes pays dividends.
When buying some components at the local electronic parts store, and mentioning I was rebuilding a vintage computer, I was offered a "new in box" Longshine LCS-6610F ISA Floppy disk adapter (Rev W1) for NZ$11.50
It uses the SMC FDC37C65 chipset, has a bios and supports the usual 360k to 1.44mb drives and having two crystals installed, it should offer ta good range of drive support.

I did find mention when digging for info on the controller, that the chipset may support 2.88mb.

I'll run the ImageDisk fdctest on it at some stage and see how it goes.

With any luck, it should support 8" drives as well.
I did use a PC many years ago, to transfer data to 8" for an IBM payroll system.
I think it had a dedicated 8" controller and software.
Click to expand...
Good score mate.

I managed to pick up a few second hand ones of TradeMe over the years. Fitted one to my Redstone XT Turbo EGA set up.
 
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