Emulator

Fluxengine works fine with Windows 8.1. Not bad!

Micky

5) I can’t be arsed.

👍 😂 🍺

I can’t be arsed

I refer to the earlier comment about what people do or don’t do with their time.

I’ve not used PCs with a hardware floppy controller for over a decade

I happen to have one, in unknown state, when it was still a definite “worker” it was running Ubuntu with FreeRADIUS¹. I didn’t use the floppy drive in that though. It was pensioned off 12 years ago.

¹ One of a pair (for resilience) that did the authentication for the whole work environment.
It was replaced by dedicated Cisco² hardware with much more CPU/memory/etc that lumbers along on a set of 6 (six) slabs of badged metal

Have you all a problem with real floppy’s? All modern things are good. No, this is not so.

Micky

lol

I’d like to backup to VHS tape, can anybody help me?

No, but I think it’s time I was able to properly interface a sensible storage device otherwise it’s clearly not a proper emulator.

If I can’t use this by next week and get Impression installed, I’m writing to my MP.

Have you all a problem with real floppy’s

LOL. As Peter quite rightly says. My first thought drifted away from IT.¹

My first system² was cassette tape input, as was the second as I couldn’t afford a floppy drive. Hard Disc was a dream, plus none of us had enough to fill a 10MB drive anyway.
Thirty-nine years of IT support.

I think there’s a chance I know good from bad, even though I’m on the younger end of the IT crowd round here.

¹ At our increasing age, “real floppies” could have a totally different interpretation.

I’d like to backup to VHS tape

VHS? <spit>

ßetamax, if you please.
Through I will settle for V2000.

My first system was cassette tape input

Ditto. But it was Acorn, not that Sinclair junk where you didn’t dare breathe for the eight or so minutes it took to load (heh, and kids today think their broadband is slow).

I’m writing to my MP.

Uh-huh. And you’re expecting what? ;p

As for the floppies, somewhere I have an eight inch (quiet, Steve).
Can I expect support for it by, say, next week?

I’m literally carrying around an 8" floppy for show-and-tell with a younger friend who didn’t recognise what it was on my “Never Forget!” T-Shirt. He knew the 3.5", but was confused by the HD printed on it.

I’d like to backup to VHS tape

Oh that reminds me I still need to image my old VHS stuff about OOP programming, I have original courses from Borland! Unless someone already put that stuff on YouTube…

I presume you are referring to the Danmere backer system for VHS. I used to sell these – well tried to just as larger hard drives, CD and later DVD burners, then USB keys started to appear and sizes took off. Eventually sold my old stock to someone who i think was just curious in the technology. They were not common down under – believe they were developed in the UK.
quick DDG search turned up the following link (apologies is a youtube link):
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6t29mf/lgr_oddware_danmere_backer_vhs_hard_drive_backup/There was effort to port it to Linux so might have been possible for RISC OS at the time but even for RISC OS this was a niche outdated technology.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6t29mf/lgr_oddware_danmere_backer_vhs_hard_drive_backup/

sorry link was misformatted

picture here:
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/computer-system-unopened-danmere-1775236081

I won’t need to convert my VHS, found almost them all on archive(.)org :)

Example here, The World of Objects from Borland! https://archive.org/details/TheWorldOfObjects

Good times!

found almost them all on archive(.)org :)

Quite a treasure trove, that place.
I recently found a film I really liked when I was a lot younger, Paperhouse, on there.
Surely dubious copyright, but whatever, click→download→enjoy.

A couple of thoughts:

Does the OP want to routinely use floppy discs to store ADFS-formatted data? If yes, then there is really no option other than to have a real floppy drive (not a standard USB one, as mentioned before, because that isn’t ADFS-compatible). But if the only reason is to get data off existing ADFS discs, then IIRC CJE Micro’s offer a service to read them and supply an image.

If a real floppy drive is necessary, it occurred to me that even a lowly LPC1114 running at 48 MHz would be fast enough to read and write the data. But writing the software would take a very long time. (I’m not going to do it; I have other projects that are likely to help more people.)

If a real floppy drive is necessary, it occurred to me that even a lowly LPC1114 running at 48 MHz would be fast enough to read and write the data.

48MHz? Is that decoding directly from the drive or via an FDC?

I wonder if it would be possible to run the floppy interface into a flexible FDC such as the WD1772 to handle turning the drive signals into a data stream. Then the processor side of things can be simpler. Heck, once upon a time an 8MHz ARM handled that task (and only lost its marbles slightly when reading from floppy in MODE 31).

Ok, I test WinUAE, Amiga emulator for Windows, with the FloppyBridge Plugin for the Greaseweazle. Works very good. You can format discs, write discs, copy discs and load and start programs.

Connected via USB. WinUAE is a free program too.

Micky