Point of data: A couple years ago I was using my Linux box to write out 5.25 inch Dos floppies...definitely in 1.2M, can't remember if I abused it into writing 360K floppies as well. --Jason On July 29, 2019 4:53:37 PM PDT, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I can't imagine it's a problem for you [Ethan], but if you need hardware, let me know! - Jonathan
I'd also be glad to help Ethan and or Dave Riley. But floppy drives I have should be readily available to them. Apparently the previous maintainer was using a 3.5" 1.44M drive, presumably on some generic PC of some sort.
The fun stuff would be to extend the PC floppy drive to support 8-inch again. There's a few MS-DOS formats for that.
But I don't know which flavor of controller-chip the Linux kernal-driver currently supports. Our friends may need help on those details.
The most-recent kind of floppy-controllers on PC class mobos, is/was probably embedded deep inside one of those "Super I/O" surface-mount chips. While specs on FDC's go back quite aways, there's the troublesome issue of modes of operation; particularly single-density. Density operation depends somewhat on how the read data-stream is decoded with phase-sensitive hardware.
I'm not aware of a PCI floppy controller board, as an upgrade to a modern PC. And I think the various USB floppy devices are another class
of driver, my guess.
At this point I'm out of my depth, on modern details. I'm just pointing
at the gotcha's I'm vaguely aware of. I doubt modern Linux supports more than DD/HD 720K and 1.4M and 2.88M 3.5" diskettes in MS-DOS FAT format.
Maybe 1.2M/360K 5.25-inch, as did PC mobos a generation ago. And of course, Linux has "dd" which just writes out sectors of data (still to some kind of formatted diskette).
"SWIM3 driver for NetBSD"? (shiver) That would be a PowerPC Mac reference, or maybe 68K Mac? I guess I could run NetBSD on my Mac IIci as a server, for what I'm not sure... ;) or a 7100.... It's all good of course.
Regards, Herb
-- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net preserve, recover, restore 1970's computing email: hjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT com or try later herbjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT info
-- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.