Can you use a USB floppy drive with RISC OS on a Pi?

What is VA5000?

Micky

A commercial emulator of the A5000 machine sold by 3QD

A similar problem turned up in one of the computer mags.

Did a USB Zip drive handle old floppies?

Also a PCIe disc controller – fit Ti? came up on search of the web.

[Edit]
Note on a Win machine the Floppy drive must be internal – I wonder if VRpc DL would work on a old machine and be made to read floppies?

These days you are lucky if machines have DVD drives :-(

Sounds a bit silly that the logic to read specific formats reside on the drive and not the computer accessing it. My option is a Sandberg USB floppy drive which is supposed to read both M$ and Apple formats – which means only those two, or what?

Yup, welcome to the modern world of tat. Old hardware is your friend when it comes to reading old media.

Apple format??

I wonder what is in the DVD USB players?

I wonder what is in the DVD USB players?

Standard drives. There is no real difference in accessing a USB CD/DVD-BD compared to ATAPI/S-ATA – you always get the “logical block” view on the medium (which is basically identical to what is physically on the medium (ignoring low-level details like EFM modulation, EDC+ECC etc. for the moment)).

The problem with USB floppy drives is that they also present the “logical block” view, but they only know the physical layout of DOS floppies wrt heads/tracks/sectors/sector size, so that’s what they map to the logical block view. The firmware would need to be a lot more intelligent to be able to detect and read/write more physical formats to map that to that logical block view (and, due to the unlimited amount of different physical formats, automatic detection might be impossible). The USB mass storage standard does not allow for fine-grained control of the drive like the old floppy disc controllers like the NEC765 or the WD1772, and this is where specific highly flexible devices like GreaseWeazle, KryoFlux or FluxEngine step in.

Yup, welcome to the modern world of tat.

One of these days I’ll get around to dusting off some and trying the floppy drive with OmniFlop, something I’ve kept meaning to do for the last decade.
Not sure I trust the state of my A7000, let alone the A3000 living in the attic.

Did a USB Zip drive handle old floppies?

Depends what you mean by “floppy”. If Zip disc, then yes, USB versions would read the ones created using a parallel port drive.
The problem, as I recall, were that there were ultimately two types of Zip disc. One that was 150MB (or something like that) and one that was larger. The newer drives could read the older discs, but not vice versa for obvious reasons. And while this absolutely isn’t a new problem (think DD vs HD floppies), people weaned on Windows95 (etc) were… shall we say… less technologically inclined.

If you meant did a Zip drive handle 3.5" style floppies, then no. The technology was fairly similar in concept (spinning magnetic disc with a pair of heads that moved across the surface) but otherwise the internals were completely different. It’s like asking if a RiscPC’s 3.5" drive could read BBC Micro 5.25" floppies. Same idea, but rather different hardware and disc size.

Note on a Win machine the Floppy drive must be internal

Yes. It needs to not only be internal, but have an actual FDC that can be controlled at a low level (some floppy hardware was ‘smarter’ and thus wouldn’t allow access to track zero which is meaningful to RISC OS but not DOS).

Sounds a bit silly that the logic to read specific formats reside on the drive and not the computer accessing it.

Not at all. USB bulk media presents a sector-based view of a filesystem, which is a far cry from the rather low level (track/head/sector) view of a floppy disc. So in order to do what it needs to do, the USB floppy will preload a lot of the disc data into a cache (you’ll hear it chug a lot as the disc is mounted) on order to serve up the data requested. From playing with mine, I think the onboard cache is around 512KB, as it seems to satisfy a fair amount of requests immediately without starting the disc, only spinning the thing up once the cache can’t satisfy the request.
And from here, it comes down to economy of scale. Millions of DOS/Windows users, versus a rather small number of “everything else”.
The fact that Elesar haven’t built one, nor has RISCOSBits, nor CJE, nor R-Comp says about all that needs said about how well the things would sell in reality.

It would have been nice if the USB floppy chip had a way of being able to do low level disc access, but this isn’t provided for in the USB spec and bolting it on as an extra doodah risks reducing compatibility and it’s all that development for a very small amount of use case.

a Sandberg USB floppy drive which is supposed to read both M$ and Apple formats – which means only those two, or what?

What’s the model number? The info that I’ve found on the Sandberg 133-50 says it is only capable of reading 720K and 1.44M FAT format discs. No, it won’t read FileCore. Neither will it read that gonzo 1.8MB format that Windows95 introduced. Or extfs. Or…..

Old hardware is your friend when it comes to reading old media.

This is the best way. If possible, read ‘em back on the machine that created them.
Of course, with Acorn’s NiCad’s being what they were, this isn’t always an option. :-/

Apple format??

What, ya think Apple used pedestrian formats like those cheap crappy PCs? Possibly HFS or HFS+.

I wonder what is in the DVD USB players?

Depends upon the age. Older hardware is likely to be an actual regular SCSI DVD drive with a little circuitboard plugged into the SCSI port that translates SCSI to USB.
Newer hardware will do away with the SCSI port and have the USB chip directly on the motherboard. It’s likely to be a more custom design in order to get it to be flatter and non-chunky, though the actual drive mechanics are probably the same.

Not sure I trust the state of my A7000, let alone the A3000 living in the attic.

And, of course, it’s worth noting that the A3000’s standard drive (and OS) is too old to be able to read the F format (1.6M) discs.

something I’ve kept meaning to do for the last decade.

I have a big box of discs, but living in an old house (with dampness), they’re probably all dead. Oh well. Stuff that was important got copied to harddisc, network, spread around, probably on one of the backup CDs. Stuff that didn’t get copied…..was probably a load of bollocks that’s best left in the past.

The problem, as I recall, were that there were ultimately two types of Zip disc. One that was 150MB (or something like that) and one that was larger. The newer drives could read the older discs, but not vice versa for obvious reasons.

The biggest problem was the “click of death” and general reliability problems with Zip discs. Apart from that, it was pretty much the only sensible mid-90s solution for random access writable media of a size considerably larger than floppies. SyQuests were niche and maybe even worse wrt reliability (at least the 3.5" drives) and much more expensive media-wise, tape streamers were always a bad idea and the first generation CD-R drives…well, there was a reason why USB sticks were everywhere soon.

The nice thing about Zip drives was that they were available for all connection technologies. SCSI, IDE/ATAPI, USB, Firewire, Parallel. Even today, I would choose parallel Zip to solve the “my Risc PC has no networking and I need to transfer more than 4 MB of data” problem.

Zip came in three capacities – the original 100 MB one, then the 250 MB one (which could still read and write the 100 MB media) and finally the 750 MB one (which could only read the 100 MB original, but not write it).

If you meant did a Zip drive handle 3.5" style floppies, then no.

There was the SuperDisk/Imation LS-120, although a fair bit later (two or three years IIRC) than first generation 100 MB Zip drives. Based on the Floptical technology for the 120 MB discs, they could also read/write 720 KB/1.44 MB floppies.

Note on a Win machine the Floppy drive must be internal – I wonder if VRpc DL would work on a old machine and be made to read floppies?

Yes, I’d forgotten, so I fired up said XP machine to have a look and VRPC-DL is also installed on there and will access Filecore Floppies via the internal Floppy drive

SyQuests were niche and maybe even worse wrt reliability (at least the 3.5" drives) and much more expensive media-wise

I used SyQuests, but I’m struggling to remember what sizes though, I think I started off with the original 5.25" 44MB and topped out at 270MB, I didn’t use the 3.5" stuff which were designed to complete with the Zip/Jazz drives and were floppy disc like rather than hard discs in cartridges. I didn’t have any reliability problems with the SyQuests, but I only ever used them as HD backups in the same drive. Zip discs on the other hand were used for transferring stuff around, and would suffer from misalignment in different drives as well as outright click of death failures.

I wonder what is in the DVD USB players?

https://heyrick.eu/blog/index.php?diary=20231123

I used SyQuests, but I’m struggling to remember what sizes though, I think I started off with the original 5.25" 44MB and topped out at 270MB,

The 5.25" variant was pretty much the standard data exchange medium for the whole printing industry. It started with 44 MB, followed by 88 MB with finally 200 MB. All backwards compatible IIRC. They were really solid, and the drives were cheaper and a lot faster than the Magneto-Optic competition.

I didn’t use the 3.5" stuff which were designed to complete with the Zip/Jazz drives and were floppy disc like rather than hard discs in cartridges.

The 3.5" stuff was technologically identical to the 5.25" stuff. “Real” harddisc platter stack in a plastic cartridge. At least the 105MB and 270MB ones (which I had), not sure about the later EZFlyer-something stuff (135 MB and 230 MB IIRC?).

The 3.5" stuff was technologically identical to the 5.25" stuff. “Real” harddisc platter stack in a plastic cartridge.

Somewhat more developed than the removable disc in the PDP 11 setup that hosted our equipment database

There was the SuperDisk/Imation LS-120, although a fair bit later (two or three years IIRC) than first generation 100 MB Zip drives. Based on the Floptical technology for the 120 MB discs, they could also read/write 720 KB/1.44 MB floppies.

They had a SCSI interface, and the same issue re sector numbering starting at 1 (DOS) not 0 (ADFS) as USB floppies later did. I recall some Acorn company was in discussions with the manufacturer about a firmware fix, but nothing came of it.

I have just plugged my IBM 3 1/2 inch usb floppy drive into my Pi400 and can confirm that absolutely nothing at all happens.

I don’t know what the RISC OS for lsusb is but when I plug it into linux it says “Bus 001 Device 011: ID 057b:0000 Y-E Data, Inc. FlashBuster-U Floppy”, on my mac lsusb is broken but it mounts the media which was a bit of a surprise.

I had a 44M Syquest scsi drive, which didn’t work with Acorn SCSI podule, but I managed to get it to work via a Level3 host adapter and the Archimedes IO podule at one point.

You can use usbdevices on RISC OS. I presume the media you tried was DOS formatted?

Did Colin’s (not me) mods for USB DOS floppy get added to ROs source’s?

What is this?

http://www.stdevel.co.uk/supp_massfs.html

A program or module that can handle USB floppy devices?

Micky

A program or module that can handle USB floppy devices?

MassFS is for “the other USB API” also known as “Simtec USB”, which was used for the Unipod and Simtec USB podules and the A9Home (and was planned to be used for the MicroDigital Omega, but that never happened). So basically Risc PC/RISC OS 3.x/RISC OS 4.x-only territory with very old hardware.

It also never had floppy support IIRC, but only supported USB sticks and things like that that pretended to be some kind of hardisc.

I have just plugged my IBM 3 1/2 inch usb floppy drive into my Pi400 and can confirm that absolutely nothing at all happens.

RISC OS doesn’t currently support USB floppies.

This is a floppy interface for the Raspberry Pi. The driver is written in Python.

https://www.smbaker.com/raspberry-pi-floppy-controller-board

Micky

Still have a couple of Jaz HD cartridges but no drive nor OS to read’em.. just old Media Lab and Network Computing* material on them probably, river under the bridge.

• The N|C was fine for mass user settings like education/bureaucracy (low admin costs) but stuck on a boob tube with neither the screen rez nor network speed to make that work well – what turkey came up with that oxymoron?! A mass user focus could have had some success seeing (at that time) rather high-class material and admin tools for RISC OS. Heh, if made “standard” RO would be 64-bit 10 years ago..

Out of interest I plugged my USB CD/DVD-wr drive into my Pi400.

I configured one CD drive, and put a cd in the drive.

This seems to crash the USB stack as I lost keyboard and mouse. The clock in my task bar was still running though so not the entire os was dead.

Also it would not boot with the cd drive still plugged in. It stopped on the black screen listing the modules before getting to the desktop.

I think we can conclude that “RISC OS doesn’t currently support USB CD_ROMS” either.

I had to scratch around to even find one, it seems all I have are Browse, Risc Cafe and several issues of DDE in RISC OS CD ROM format. I don’t think lack of support is much of an issue.