RiscOS without floppy support

RiscOS is a very good system but not without floppy support. I won’t use it anymore.

Micky

RiscOS is a very good system but not without floppy support.

It has floppy support, which works absolutely fine on my old Risc PC and my Iyonix

Well Micky don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. The OS is what it is love it or hate it it’s free open source if it don’t do what you want change it, if you do not have the skills then pay someone to do it for you don’t bitch about it.
Let me get that door for you. look Elvis sorry Micky has left the building.

I don’t have a floppy drive on my Raspberry Pi. But then, I uploaded everything from my old floppies to hard drives years before I retired my RiscPCs, and haven’t used a floppy for decades…

RiscOS is a very good system but not without floppy support.

Thats not right. I have a floppy support on Titanium and Raspberry Pi. Thanks to Colin. I can use DOS Floppydiscs. Is the same support I get in WIN and other.
Why should the floppy support a reason to leave? I don’t understand your problem.

RiscOS is a very good system but not without floppy support. I won’t use it anymore.

I won’t use floppy discs any more.

In fact I haven’t used them in 20 years or more. For anything. Nor has anyone else, really.

It’s 2024. If you want to store data, floppy discs are not a good choice. Here are some reasons:

• They are small
• They are slow
• The discs degrade over time
• They are expensive
• They are not portable between systems (ADFS format)
• The discs wear out
• The drives wear out

If you have some data on floppy discs from a long time ago, for heaven’s sake get someone to transfer the data off for you (friend or commercial) and thereafter use something better like SSD, HDD, USB drive or SD card.

If there is some other reason why you must use ADFS-formatted floppy discs, please let us know.

Until two years ago I still had a box full of 8" floppy disks, IBM format. Don’t remember the capacity – maybe 64kBi? Haven’t had anything that could read or write them since about 1990. Of course they were already long obsolete then.

(We finally sold the old house in Ely two years ago, and had a bit of a clear-out.)

8" floppy disks, IBM format. Don’t remember the capacity – maybe 64kBi?

360 720 ??

360 720 ??

Just as an historical note, the 8" had different formats than the 5" Steve. The 8" had from 240 KB to 555KB (in older IBM formats) and they went all the way up to 1/1.2/1.8MB (with the last IBM format for the 8"), but the 1,1.2 and 1.8MB never became popular, so the max you can find around and on retro shops is 555KB IIRC.

I kept some 5.25" hard sectored discs, and many more 5.25" soft sectored ones (Flex and Flex9), until my wife finally presuaded me to throw them out last year. I hadn’t actually done anything with them since the 1980s, it has to be admitted.

I cannot understand why anyone wants to use floppy discs nowadays. I’m hoping that Micky will explain.

@Clive I am looking at one here, BASF FlexyDisk: 26×128 bytes/sector. So about 3K. Unless I’m misreading it.

[Edit: I was misreading it, see Rick’s comment, below]

@Dave Floppy discs are not small, they’re huge (which has the advantage that you can find the damn things when you drop one!); the volume would probably enclose a petabyte of data on sd cards (no, I didn’t do the maths, but if I’m wrong, I won’t be for long).

@Dave Floppy discs are not small, they’re huge

Small data capacity for the physical size is the issue. Cheap USB sticks 10⁶ larger than floppy discs cost less than £10

26×128 bytes/sector

128 bytes per sector
26 sectors per track
What, about 77 tracks per side?

That’s about 256K for a single sided disc, or half a megabyte for a double sided disc.

Divide by two if your drive offers fewer tracks, but it looks as if “77” is a common value for 26×128 discs.

The physical size of the heads in the 8" drive* on the old IBM Word Processor I was given precludes the possibility of there having been 77 tracks. 15 or 16 would be credible. So maybe the 64kBi that sticks in my unreliable memory might actually be about right.

• Yes, I took it apart after I retired it, to have a look at its innards. I’ve probably still got the magnets and a few screws out of it, but which in my eclection they are, who knows?

If it’s a DisplayWriter (cost the equivalent of ~$28,000 (in today’s money) new – eeeek!), then the format is a little peculiar:

Single Sided, FM, Track 1 26 sectors 128bytes/sect and tracks 2-77 15 sectors@ 256 bytes/sect.

[source]

Even if the head itself is gigantic, the actual magnetic part isn’t. It’s the same with 5.25" drives, big chunky head but fairly small read/write part.

Yes, I took it apart after I retired it, to have a look at its innards.

Any photos? It was an interesting design, from back before everybody used cheap generic stuff.

Sorry, no photos – this was before the days of digital cameras, and film was expensive 8~(

There’s this one of a different machine – also an IBM word processor – of somewhat older vintage: https://www.deviantart.com/coshipi/art/Anything-Dad-can-do-2-11200041

This older one didn’t even have 8" floppies, it had 7-hole punched paper tape.

Even if the head itself is gigantic, the actual magnetic part isn’t.

Yup, I’m familiar with that, of course. Head about 6mm wide. Could see the actual gap in the ferrite perfectly clearly, a good 2mm along the radius of the dist. No way did that have 77 tracks, or even half that.

Did you notice that the pole pieces were necked down in the region of the magnetic gap?

Did you notice that the pole pieces were necked down in the region of the magnetic gap?

Of course. The gap is between the necked-down ends. On modern hard drives, this is only visible under considerable magnification. On those old 8" IBM drives, it’s clearly visible with the naked eye. On 5.5" floppy drives, only with a decent magnifying glass (or shorter sight than mine (I’m actually long-sighted)).

I rather suspect that these were either very early 8" drives, or cheapo lower-spec specials for a particular product – it was a word processor, at a time when the higher-spec drives (for computers, that probably cared more about drive capacity) were bloody expensive. Certainly these disks didn’t have any software on them, they were purely for the actual words that were being processed.

For what it’s worth, I’ve worked on stuff like this. A few samples of my work here: https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Art/TechDrawings.html (none of these pics all that close to this particular issue, of course)

Rob Andrews,
I understand your frustration, but I would urge you to be more civil…

Micky,
Were you still using floppy disks? What were you using them for, and on what hardware or what system?
How have you been affected by the loss of floppy support?
I’m surprised if anyone was still using them at all, even on RISC OS.

PM

F.W.I.W. I have boxes filled with floppies for various Acorn machines.
Those are awaiting the times when I will be retired and as such my RiscPC has the task of being still functional when that time arrives.
If people want to use floppy disks it is their own decision and I fail to see why people are not kind to us older ones who like their old stuff.
Its easy to ridicule and point but apparently much harder to help finding solutions for those who ask for help..

Myself I have been looking for a solution to read my old Acorn Atom floppies (5.25") and no, there is no easy way to do that.
Why? because they are my old floppies. As we grow older the things from long ago will become interesting again. I’m sure nobody else but me would benefit from my old floppies. But I sure would love to browse through them again at some time in the not too distant future.

I hope not to offend anyone by saying that for me RISC OS is retro computing. And as such the thing is about having fun.
If I get to live another 50 years I might even do some FPGA tinkering for all that and include floppy support. And believe me, I would not care if people would tell me that it’s not necessary or that there is much better/faster hardware.

If anyone already has started some floppy controller in FPGA then I am very happy to look at their code and test stuff. (Verilog, please)
It’s probably sufficient to do one track at a time.

Who knows, maybe there are others here who share my warm nostalgia and like to tinker like this too.

and I fail to see why people are not kind to us older ones who like their old stuff.

Given the heritage of RISC OS, I think you’ll find some of us grew up with Acorn.
There’s nothing wrong with liking older stuff. Look around, there are projects to recreate old consoles and computers (like the Spectrum) on FPGAs. Why? Because.

However, there have been big leaps in computing between the old and the new. For one thing, the most common I/O port you’ll see these days is some form of USB. You might even struggle to find VGA, it’ll be HDMI. And, likewise, things like floppy drives don’t really exist any more. I mean, 1.44MB max? That’s miniscule, plus they’re enormous compared with a USB key or µSD card.

All of this means that using the old stuff with the new stuff will introduce various challenges.

but apparently much harder to help finding solutions for those who ask for help..

Excuse me, but please re-read the relevant thread. The person was looking for solutions to be able to use Acorn format discs using the emulator, apparently under the belief that… let me just quote this:

I mean a emulator must emulate ALL functions from the emulated system. Missing floppy support is bad. Why not real floppy support and floppy images?

One emulator that may have support for native floppies is no longer in development, and the one that is being developed won’t get floppy support any time soon as it’s not a priority and you’ll not find many modern machines that even have a built-in floppy drive. That part is important as USB ones won’t work, “for technical reasons”.

We pointed all of this out, and provided suggestions as to possible alternatives.

It wasn’t a perfect solution, but clearly there are not that many people that need to deal with floppy discs with their Acorn kit. Or if they do, they probably have some sort of real machine around with which to read them.

Or, in my case, I copied everything useful to harddisc back in the ‘90s and just made copies of it on different harddiscs, and eventually the stuff I actually wanted (which wasn’t a lot as most of the old stuff was 26 bit so I let it fall by the wayside) was pushed over to the PC using 10baseT, and later done again to get it onto the Pi. I wouldn’t even think about dealing with ADFS floppies these days with Pi-type hardware. Heck, I don’t even use FAT floppies any more. My ancient PC no longer has a floppy drive, I removed it so I could use the space for a second SATA drive, and I got myself a cheap USB floppy drive…that I used a couple of times to check it worked and then…
The last times I used a floppy disc with RISC OS kit was when farting around with the FileStore server.

Anyway, to then see a message that was akin to “well, thanks, bye” probably irritated people. Okay, we tried to help. It didn’t work out. The best thing to do if one feels they can’t really continue is to simply not say anything.

Myself I have been looking for a solution to read my old Acorn Atom floppies (5.25") and no, there is no easy way to do that.

Do you have a Greaseweasel? It works with 5.25" floppies. I think the problem that you might have is sorting out the actual disc format. Do you know anything about the Atom format? Is it like DFS?

Failing that, a way that I used to use with ADFS floppies when I got a broken directory was to just sector-op read the entire disc to a file on harddisc, then drop it into Zap, and then pull out stuff that I recognised directly from the raw data. The older formats were simpler in this respect as I think files had to be contiguous (what *Compact was for), but also there is help like files start on a sector boundary, often there are recognisable headers, and so on.

No, it’s not ideal, but in the absence of functioning old hardware…

I might even do some FPGA tinkering for all that and include floppy support. And believe me, I would not care if people would tell me that it’s not necessary or that there is much better/faster hardware.

Hey, if you want to roll your own solution, go for it. I reinvent my own wheels from time to time, as the end result isn’t so important as the journey getting there. The learning, the tinkering, and of course the immense satisfaction when it works (let’s quietly gloss over the head banging and millennia spent staring at datasheets).

I wish I was smart enough to be able to do FPGA stuff.

If people want to use floppy disks it is their own decision and I fail to see why people are not kind to us older ones who like their old stuff.

Like me, you have old hardware¹ and it works to read floppy disc (or did last time I fired it up)
I have no issue with anyone using old hardware to read old discs. I do sympathise with the authors of emulators when people expect them to add features for free so that the limited number of users without RISC OS hardware can access discs.
We all have limited time, and the emulator authors can spend theirs how they wish.

¹ We may qualify as old hardware, going soft.