On Sat, 2 May 2020, Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Part of my charm is simplicity. It often inspires discussion. One thing I was hoping was for people to chime in on the fact that there are vintage computer enthusiasts that have the original machines and artifacts to retrieve from floppies instead of modern emulators and devices.
In my opinion, any serious vintage computer hobbyist should have a dedicated "media" system for archiving data and creating new media for vintage systems. For my imaging system I'm using an Abit KV8PRO motherboard, with an Athlon CPU, onboard 10/100/1000 ethernet, 1 AGP 8X/4X slot, 5 PCI slots, SATA and IDE drive support, and 4 USB ports. The onboard floppy controller will handle all formats except 128 byte/sector MFM. I haven't run across anything yet that uses that format. I also have a Catweasel MK4+ for things that Dave Dunfields's IMD or the native floppy controller won't handle. I have the motherboard installed in a full size tower case, with lots of places to mount drives. I also installed a SCSI interface for lots of other drive options. For the moment, I have to recable the drives for different media. For 5-1/4", I connect the 360K and 1.2M drives. For 3-1/2" I have a 1.44M drive. For 8" I use a Tandon TM-848 DS drive in an external case, connected via a "D Bit" FDADAP adapter board. http://www.dbit.com/fdadap.html On this system I mostly run Linux and FreeDOS. When using Imagedisk (IMD), I'll boot FreeDOS to read and write diskettes. To transfer the images to/from my server, I'll boot into Linux and mount the FreeDOS drive. I suppose I could try to get FreeDOS on the net, but I haven't bothered. I'm not into the older Apple GCR format diskettes, but the Catweasel will handle them if necessary. For my TRS-80 and CP/M work, this system handles just about anything I need. For some of the weird TRS-80 stuff, I can run David Keil's Model 1 or Model 4 emulator under FreeDOS and directly access the floppy drives. My point: use the right tool for the job. It's not difficult to put together a system to handle your media conversion needs, and you won't be dependent on other hobbyists for boot disks. Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/