FloppoScope Is A Disk Image Analyzer

November 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 10 Comments

If you’re a big retro tech fan, you might still have a floppy drive on hand, or even some sort of high-end disk imaging solution. If you’re a little less committed, you may still have plenty of disk images on your hard drive for various reasons. Either way, you might find [0ldStaph]’s latest project to be useful for examining any disk images you have on hand.

FloppoScope is a browser-based tool for analyzing floppy disk images. Despite being browser-based, everything runs locally, so you’re not actually risking any sensitive data by using the tool—though we can’t imagine you’ve got too much Top Secret intel stored as floppy disk images, anyway.

The tool will draw you a nicely color-coded map of the disk layout and shows all the pertinent data for the filesystem of the image. It will even let you preview common file types if you need. The tool can also convert images between various formats, and spit out reports on things like bad sectors or corrupted files that have been detected. FloppoScope can handle everything from PC and Apple format disks, to Amiga, Atari DOS, and BBC Micro stuff. Oddities like various Sharp MZ machines and the NeXTSTEP format are included too. It works with both image and flux files, as well, so whichever way you captured your disks, it should work here.

We’ve looked at the importance of imaging remaining floppy disks quite recently. If you’ve got unpreserved disks sitting in your bedroom, shed, or study, consider getting on that as a matter of priority at this point!

It’s Now Imperative That You Copy That Floppy

July 7, 2026 by Tom Nardi 20 Comments

In the early 1990s, Don’t Copy That Floppy was an anti-piracy campaign that attempted to connect with computer-savvy youth through the power of hip-hop. While somewhat difficult to imagine given our current draconian Digital Rights Management (DRM) hellscape, warning kids about the potential legal ramifications of duplicating floppy disks containing copyrighted software was seen as necessary since at the time there was usually nothing preventing users from simply copying the contents of one disk to another.

Unfortunately 30+ years down the road, we’re now finding that somebody really should have been backing up some of those disks. Which is why the University of Cambridge of launched the Future Nostalgia project and produced Copy That Floppy! — a phenomenal guide on preserving the contents of floppy disks while we still can.

Visualizing a disk’s flux stream can identify debris and damage.

There’s no telling how much data could potentially be lost to time because its stuck on such an antiquated and fragile storage media, and the situation only gets worse with the passage of time. The problem isn’t just that modern computers don’t have floppy drives. The disks themselves degrade with age, a process which is accelerated if they aren’t stored properly.

As such, Copy That Floppy! only briefly touches on the most ideal situation — that is, buying a USB floppy drive and making copies of the bog standard 3.5 inch disks you might come across. It then moves right on into more advanced topics, such as interfacing with less common drive types, how to safely clean floppies, and the use of advanced tools such as Greaseweazle to analyze captured disk images.

We’ve seen demonstrations of some of these techniques before, and a few years back Adafruit got interested in floppy preservation with modern hardware. But in-depth guides like these that pull all that information together into one place are valuable resources.

TV Remote Uses Floppy Disks

January 19, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

Famously, the save icon on most computer user interfaces references a fairly obsolete piece of technology: the venerable floppy disk. It’s likely that most people below the age of about 30 have never interacted with one of these once-ubiquitous storage devices, so much so that many don’t recognize the object within the save icon itself anymore. [Mads Chr. Olesen]’s kids might be an exception here, though, as he’s built a remote control for them that uses real floppy disks to select the programming on the TV.

This project partially began as a way to keep the children from turning into zombies as a result of the modern auto-play brainrot-based economies common in modern media. He wanted his kids to be able to make meaningful choices and then not get sucked into these types of systems. The floppy disk presents a perfect solution here. They’re tangible media and can actually store data, so he got to work interfacing a real floppy disk drive with a microcontroller. When a disk is inserted the microcontroller wakes up, reads the data, and then sends out a command to stream the relevant media to the Chromecast on the TV. When the disk is removed, the microcontroller stops play.

Like any remote, this one is battery powered as well, but running a microcontroller and floppy disk drive came with a few challenges. This one is powered by 18650 lithium cells to help with current peaks from the drive, and after working out a few kinks it works perfectly for [Mads] children. We’ve seen a few other floppy disk-based remote controls like this one which replaces the data stored on the magnetic disc with an RFID tag instead.

Playing Factorio On A Floppy Disk Cluster

January 13, 2026 by Fenix Guthrie 9 Comments

While a revolutionary storage system for their time, floppy disks are not terribly useful these days. Though high failure rates and slow speeds are an issue, for this project, the key issue is capacity. That’s because [DocJade’s] goal is playing the video game Factorio off floppy disks.

Storing several gigabytes of data on floppy disks is a rather daunting challenge. But instead of using a RAID array, only a single reader and a custom file system is deployed in this setup. A single disk is dedicated to storing pool information allowing for caching of file locations, reducing disk swaps. The file system can also store single files across multiple disks for storage of larger files. Everything mounts in fuse and is loosely POSIX compliment, but lacks some features like permissions and links.

With the data stored across thousands of disks, the user is prompted to insert a new disk when needed. This ends up being the limiting factor in read and write speeds, rather than the famously slow speeds of floppies. In fact, it takes about a week to load all of Factorio in this manner, even after optimizations to reduce disk swaps. Factorio is also one of the few games that could be installed in this manner, as it loads most of the game into memory at launch. Many other games that dynamically load textures and world maps would simply crash when a chunk is not immediately available.

Not a Factorio fan? No worries, you could always install modern Linux on a floppy!

Continue reading “Playing Factorio On A Floppy Disk Cluster” →

Print Pixel Art To A Floppy Disk

January 4, 2026 by Fenix Guthrie 3 Comments

Here at Hackaday we love floppy disks. While they are by no means a practical or useful means of storing data in the age of solid state storage, there is something special about the little floppy disc of magnetic film inside that iconic plastic case. That’s why we were so excited to see the tool [dbalsom] developed for printing pixel art in a floppy’s track timing diagrams!

Floppy timing diagrams are usually used to analyze the quality of an individual disk. It represents flux transitions within a single floppy tack as a 2D graph. But it’s also perfectly possible to “paint” images on a floppy this way. Granted, you can’t see these images without printing out a timing diagram, but if you’re painting images onto a floppy, that’s probably the point.

This is where pbm2track comes in handy! It takes bitmap images and encodes them onto floppy emulators, or actual floppies. The results are quite excellent, with near-perfect recreation in floppy graphical views. The results on real floppies are also recognizable as the original image. The concept is similar to a previous tool [dbalsom] created, PNG2disk

If you, too, love the nearly forgotten physical likeness of the save button, make sure to check out this modern Linux on a floppy hack next!

Thanks [gloriouscow] for the tip!

Hackaday Links: August 31, 2025

August 31, 2025 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Back in March, we covered the story of Davis Lu, a disgruntled coder who programmed a logic bomb into his employers’ systems. His code was malicious in the extreme, designed as it was to regularly search for his Active Directory entry and fire off a series of crippling commands should it appear he had been fired. His 2019 sacking and subsequent deletion of his AD profile triggered the job, wreaking havoc on servers and causing general mayhem. Whatever satisfaction Lu drew from that must have been fleeting, because he was quickly arrested, brought to trial in federal court, and found guilty of causing intentional damage to protected computer systems.

Lu faced a decade in federal prison for the stunt, but at his sentencing last week, he got four years behind bars followed by three years of supervised release. That’s still a pretty stiff sentence, and depending on where he serves it, things might not go well for him. Uber-geek Chris Boden has some experience in the federal prison system as a result of some cryptocurrency malfeasance; his video on his time in lockup is probably something Mr. Lu should watch while he can. Honestly, we feel bad for him in a way because we’ve been there; we certainly toyed with the logic bomb idea when we were coding for a living, without actually ever doing it. Maybe he thought it would just get treated as a prank, but that was probably never in the cards; as we’re fond of telling our kids, the world just doesn’t have a sense of humor anymore.

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NFC Hidden In Floppy Disk For Retro-Themed PC

August 29, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

As we all look across a sea of lifeless, nearly identically-styled consumer goods, a few of us have become nostalgic for a time when products like stereo equipment, phones, appliances, homes, cars, and furniture didn’t all look indistinguishable. Computers suffered a similar fate, with nearly everything designed to be flat and minimalist with very little character. To be sure there are plenty of retro computing projects to recapture nostalgia, but to get useful modern hardware in a fun retro-themed case check out this desktop build from [Mar] that hides a few unique extras.

The PC itself is a modern build with an up-to-date operating system, but hidden in a 386-era case with early-90s styling. The real gem of this build though is the floppy disk drive, which looks unaltered on the surface. But its core functionality has been removed and in its place an Arduino sits, looking for NFC devices. The floppy disks similarly had NFC tags installed so that when they interact with the Arduino, it can send a command to the computer to launch a corresponding game. To the user it looks as though the game loads from a floppy disk, much like it would have in the 90s albeit with much more speed and much less noise.

Modern industrial design is something that we’ve generally bemoaned as of late, and it’s great to see some of us rebelling by building unique machines like this, not to mention repurposing hardware like floppy drives for fun new uses (which [Mar] has also open-sourced on a GitHub page). It’s not the first build to toss modern hardware in a cool PC case from days of yore, either. This Hot Wheels desktop is one of our favorites.