On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 12:24:55PM -0500, Herbert Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote: (Discussing floppy emulators)
If a developer gets tired of working on some tech (or worse becomes unavailable), what happens to support for problems and availability of the "product"? Tech that uses then-standard microcontrollers (or flavors of Arduinos) may be hard to obtain when that part goes out-of-support. At the least, you have to get spares while available, and source codes for any software. Morso, if you buy for several systems.
I don't know this particular product. But I'm asking about long-term support for reasons stated. I'm curious what other think; perhaps several years is enough, enjoying buying something new every several years, etc.
Is it really that different than the original floppy drive? Models available changed every couple years. If it still worked you didn't care. If it stopped working either you replaced it with current model or tried to fix it. How difficult that was depended on if any documentation was available and if you could get parts. There is open source software for some of the units. Haven't looked to see what hardware documentation exists though hardware is pretty simple so not too hard to figure out. Some are cheap enough that getting a replacement isn't a big deal if it fails. For my ST-506 MFM reader/emulator the majority of support is for imaging disk. People don't need a lot of support for emulation and very rare to need more after they have it working in a machine unless they move it to some other odd machine.