SBC/small motherboard with real floppy controller?

[oktology]

I'm looking to build an all-in-one disk imaging box, and I think the best way to to that in terms of broad software and format support is running DOS using ImageDisk, etc. What I want to find is the smallest possible 486 or better (so I can dual-boot a *NIX if necessary) motherboard that has a real-deal Shugart-compatible floppy controller on it. Extra points if it has an ISA/PCI slot so I can also read SCSI drives.

The idea is to have a one-box solution to imaging and writing any disk format (or at least as many as possible) I'm likely to find. Atari, Amiga, TRS-80, Apple 2 (such as can be done with an ordinary drive), Commodore, FAT-12, any of the zillion CP/M formats, and Akai, Roland, E-Mu, and Ensoniq synthesizer/sampler, etc etc. It would be great to get SCSI in the mix as well, so I can image Zip/Jaz/SyQuest/tape/HD. I don't care so much about being able to read the contents of the image so much as being able to image from media and write images that the original hardware can use.

The box is going to have an 8" DS drive, a 5.25" HD drive, and a 3.5" HD drive in it. Haven't decided yet if it's worth installing a DD 5.25" as well, I've had good luck so far double-stepping an HD drive to read 40-track floppies, but I have heard that writing them back can have mixed results for use in 40-track drives. My experience so far is that an HD 3.5" drive can write DD floppies okay--please correct me if I'm wrong.

Looking for recommendations, thoughts, and criticisms--there's no way for me to know how much I don't know!

 

[Al Kossow]

"Looking for recommendations, thoughts, and criticisms"

a setup like that will be useless for anything copy-protected, which is why the world has moved to flux-imagers and devices that can support more than shugart-interface
drives like the Applesauce.

I have retired all of my older PC-based floppy imagers now and use Applesauce now exclusively for floppies

 

[Eudimorphodon]

a setup like that will be useless for anything copy-protected, which is why the world has moved to flux-imagers and devices that can support more than shugart-interface
drives like the Applesauce.

Leaving copy-protection aside, a normal PC floppy controller is useless for Amiga/Apple 2/Commodore/etc formats. Anything that uses GCR, hard sectored CP/M formats... heck, it's a roll of the dice if it'll even do single density.

 

[oktology]

Thanks for the responses, y'all.
Applesauce is way too expensive for my budget (and I think currently unavailable?), but it sounds like there should be a flux imager in the mix even if I use the floppy controller for FM/MFM recorded disks. That I want to retain, as some of the more esoteric music hardware disk formats require one (and it allows for reading disks online, which Greaseweazle doesn't, and it's the only flux imager at a price point I can justify).