Floppies For Small Files

[jlehr]

So I just received a pack of 50 brand new multicolor TDK floppies in the mail this week and I've already had notes written on how I would divide things into color. I use them primarily for doom wads, mario and other rom hacks, and documents. I also made a 41k rom file that plays 10 music tracks. I have no other question other than does anyone else do anything similar?

I know there's no way to get a usb 5.25" floppy drive, only a 3.5" and I've never owned a 5.25". One day I hope to even if I have to buy a freakin' apple II to accomplish it. I just like old media. I still have 50+ zip disks and don't get me started on optical cdrs dvdrs and bdrs.

[Dan Q]

I know there's no way to get a usb 5.25" floppy drive

You absolutely can, if you're willing to do some hackery!

What you need is a USB to ISA-34-pin floppy adapter. Here's a basic one that can only read from disks. Here's a more-sophisticated one that can read and write and also supports other drive formats including the awesome 8" disks.

If you've got internal USB headers on your motherboard you could even mount one of these inside your PC, and then install a floppy drive into a 5.25" CD-ROM drive bay for that proper "yes, this belongs here" experience.

Not included in either kit are the drive itself and the ribbon cable. If you try to buy one of these online you'll get ripped-off, but if you buy an old, possibly-broken computer that has one it'll probably turn out cheaper. (Man, I didn't know they went for as much as they do: I threw one out a few years back, more fool me!)

[rhyswynne]

If you like digital media, you should know that - especially in the 1980s in the UK - software was recorded on cassette tapes.

Thankfully, they are easy to put files on :) - convert the files into a WAV file (MP3 is uncompressed) and play it through an audio out to a cassette recorder using a standard audio jack :).

[jlehr]

I did know of the cassette media storage ;)

My guitar teacher taught me off of a tape deck playing actual audio on one of them because he was too cheap to get a real stereo lol

[Dan Q]

The magic of audio cassette tapes being used for data was that whichever of your friends had a two-deck stereo could... ahem... "make backups" of their games just by pressing play on one and record on the other.

The data on those tapes, commonly used by microcomputers in the 1980s and thereabouts, really is just modulated audio. Think "modem sounds", if you're old enough to have heard those.

There were downsides, though. No "seeking" was one of them! Suppose you had a tape which contained several pieces of data or programs. You'd typically have to tell them computer what "file" you were looking for and press play at the start of the tape, and it'd "listen" until it got to the file header for that file, and then it'd start reading data/executing code. So if you e.g. had a tape with several pieces of software on, you might try to "eyeball" it through the window on the cassette: an art a little like dropping a stylus onto the right bit of a vinyl record but much, much harder! I even had tapes where I'd used a pen to "mark" the window to show approximately how much tape needed to be dispensed from one spindle to the other in order to start loading the thing I wanted to.

[TheFrugalGamer]

There were downsides, though. No "seeking" was one of them! Suppose you had a tape which contained several pieces of data or programs. You'd typically have to tell them computer what "file" you were looking for and press play at the start of the tape, and it'd "listen" until it got to the file header for that file, and then it'd start reading data/executing code. So if you e.g. had a tape with several pieces of software on, you might try to "eyeball" it through the window on the cassette: an art a little like dropping a stylus onto the right bit of a vinyl record but much, much harder! I even had tapes where I'd used a pen to "mark" the window to show approximately how much tape needed to be dispensed from one spindle to the other in order to start loading the thing I wanted to.[/font]

I've been aware of data tapes, but never had to encounter this exact problem before. It's something I had never considered!

I remember hearing about a radio producer in the UK who used to transmit programs over the air for people to record and demo on their home PCs. Really cool way of sharing media back in the day!

But to get back to the original topic, I've always been fascinated by floppy disks, and I still have several in my house. I have an old Korg synthesizer that uses floppy disks for its voices, and the internal battery has died, so every time I turn it on I have to re-load them. The sound of the reader head inside is always really comforting to me.

There was a project online some time ago called Floppy.Exchange where users could sign up to put whatever they wanted on to a single block of a floppy disk, but it appears to be down now. That sucks, because it was a really neat idea!