Commodore Floppy Drive Fixing Chaos

June 23, 2023 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

One of the best parts of retrocomputing is that you can obtain so many broken systems and peripherals for repairing and other assorted fun. This was the wholesome activity that [Drygol] embarked on recently with a gaggle of Commodore floppy disk drives that he obtained, involving a lot of cleaning, soldering, calibrating and other assorted entertainment. This follows cold on the heels of an earlier repair session of a stash of Commodore 1541 FDDs.

Testing Commodore FDD head alignment using the 1541 diagnostic cartridge.

As with any such devices, the first thing to do is to clean the heck out of them, to remove forty-odd years of dust and other debris, followed by testing of functionality, replacing dead ICs and the usual round of (electrolytic) capacitor replacement. Retrobrighting gives it that fresh-out-of-packaging look, which leaves just the calibrating of these drives. This procedure is essential to make sure the read/write head is aligned with the tracks on the disks, and is the most fiddly part of the process.

What helps a lot here is the 1541 diagnostic cartridge by [World of Jani] that displays real-time information on the drive while you are tweaking its speed and head alignment. All you have to do is tweak the speed potentiometer, and adjust the position of the drive motor, which takes a bit of patience and a steady hand. After this repair session a few Mitsumi drives unfortunately remained dead due to busted coils. Despite a valiant repair attempt on the heads by manually rewinding the coils, this remains a topic for a potential part III.

Crafting Ribbon Cables For Retro Hardware

June 10, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 23 Comments

Building a modern computer is something plenty of us have done, and with various tools available to ensure that essentially the only thing required of the end user is to select parts and have them delivered via one’s favorite (or least expensive) online retailer. Not so with retro hardware, though. While some parts can be found used on reselling sites like eBay, often the only other option is to rebuild parts from scratch. This is sometimes the best option too, as things like ribbon cables age poorly and invisible problems with them can cause knock-on effects that feel like wild goose chases when troubleshooting. Here’s how to build your own ribbon cables for your retro machines.

[Mike] is leading us on this build because he’s been working on an old tower desktop he’s calling Rosetta which he wants to be able to use to host five different floppy disk types and convert files from one type to another. Of course the old hardware and software being used won’t support five floppy disk drives at the same time so he has a few switches involved as well. To get everything buttoned up neatly in the case he’s building his own ribbon cables to save space, especially since with his custom cables he won’t have the extraneous extra connectors that these cables are famous for.

Even though, as [Mike] notes, you can’t really buy these cables directly anymore thanks to the technology’s obsolescence, you can still find the tools and parts you’d need to create them from scratch including the ribbon, connectors, and crimping tools. Even the strain relief for these wide, fragile connectors is available and possible to build into these projects. It ends up cleaning up the build quite nicely, and he won’t be chasing down any gremlins caused by decades-old degraded multi-conductor cables. And, even though [Mike] demonstrated the floppy disk drive cables in this build, ribbon cable can be used for all kinds of things including IDE drive connectors and even GPIO cables for modern electronics projects.

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Behold The Mighty Floppotron 3.0

June 14, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 37 Comments

If anyone has been struggling to get hold of a 3.5″ floppy drive lately, we think we’ve got a clue as to why — behold, the mighty floppotron 3.0 by [Paweł Zadrożniak.] With an utterly bonkers 512 floppy drives, four flatbed scanners and sixteen hard disks of various sizes, the floppotron 3.0 MIDI synthesiser is possibly the biggest such retro hardware synthesiser so far. Since every part of the system is motor-based, nobody is going to be surprised that to power the show is quite an undertaking, with nearly twenty switched-mode PSU modules needed to keep up with the demand, averaging 300W but rated at 1.2kW peak!

A full custom MIDI-to-RS485 gateway based around the nRF52xx series MCU deals with the communication to the collection of instrument controllers. These controllers are generic enough to take RS485 input and control a dedicated driver for either an array of floppy drives (up to 192), an array of hard drives or the handful of scanners. The way the floppy drives are grouped is quite neat. Rather than using each drive to generate a specific tone, the software uses the whole column for each note. By varying the number of drives moving simultaneously over time, the sound volume varies, simulating the note envelope and giving a richer sound. Multiple columns driving in parallel give the system a 16-note polyphony. The floppies cover the low notes, with the four flatbed scanners covering the higher notes. MIDI drum sounds are mapped to the hard disks, operating in a, well, percussive manner, with different case shapes giving unique sounds. Even the firmware can be updated over MIDI! So, checkout the demo video after the break for a sweet rendition of the very familiar “Entry of the gladiators” by Czech composer Julius Fučík.

If you think this looks familiar, you’re not mistaken, we’ve covered an earlier floppotron before, but we reckon nobody has attempted to do it with ye olde eight-inch drives yet!

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Live Floppy Music Adds Elegance To Any Event

June 9, 2022 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

It wasn’t long after early humans started banging rocks together that somebody in the tribe thought they could improve on things a bit by doing it with a little rhythm. As such the first musician was born, and since it would be a couple million years before humanity figured out how to record sound, musical performances had to be experienced live throughout most of history. On the cosmic scale of things, Spotify only shows up about a zeptosecond before the big bash at midnight.

So its only fitting that [Linus Åkesson] has perfected the musical floppy drive to the point that it can now be played live. We understand the irony of this being demonstrated via the video below the break, but we think it still gets the point across — rather than having to get a whole array of carefully-scripted drives going to perform something that even comes close to a musical number, he’s able to produce tones by manipulating a single drive in real-time.

In his write-up, [Linus] not only goes over the general nuts and bolts of making music with floppy drives, but specifically explains how this Commodore 1541-II drive has been modified for its new life as a digital virtuoso. From his experiments to determine which drive moves corresponded to the most pleasing sounds, to the addition of a small microphone and a piezo sensor paired with an LMC662-based amplifier to provide a high-fidelity capture of the drive’s sounds and vibrations, there’s a lot of valuable info here for anyone else looking to make some sweet tunes with their old gear.

We’ve seen something of a resurgence of the floppy drive this year, with folks like Adafruit digging into the classic storage medium, and an experimental project to allow the Arduino IDE to create bootable x86 floppies. You won’t hear any complaints from us — while they might not offer much capacity compared to more modern tech, there’s something about a stack of multi-colored disks with hastily applied labels that warms our cold robotic hearts.

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The Ultimate 1541 Talk by Michael Steil, presented at the Vintage Computer Festival West

The Ultimate Commodore 1541 Drive Talk: A Deep Dive Into Disks, Controllers, And Much More

September 19, 2021 by Ryan Flowers 18 Comments

When we think of retrocomputing, it’s very often the computers themselves that get all the glory. There’s nothing wrong with this of course- the computers of the late 70’s and 80’s were incredible machines that were chock full of hacks in their own right. But some of the most interesting hacks of the day happened not in the computers, but rather in their peripherals. A devotee of such periphery is [Michael Steil], who was driven to compile years of research, knowledge, and hard data into The Ultimate Commodore 1541 Drive Talk which you can view below the break.

In the talk, [Michael] covers the physical disk composition and construction, the disk drives, controller hardware, and the evolution thereof. The bit-by-bit breakdown of the tracks, sectors, and header information on the disks themselves is fascinating, as is the discussion of various copy protection techniques used by vendors to prevent piracy at a time when sneakernet was in full swing.

The descent into the circuitry of the controller reveals a venerable 6502 CPU which powered many vintage computers. Further discussion divulges the secrets for getting higher performance from the 1541 drive using innovations that are as recent as 2013.

A computer historian and archaeologist, [Michael] discusses how using modified vintage hardware is sometimes enough to save your old floppy collection. He also shows how modern interfaces that read disks all the way down to the magnetic flux level can be used to reconstruct missing data.

[Michael] masterfully lays bare the complexity, engineering, and hackery that went into storing less than 200kb of data. Whether you’re a Commodore enthusiast or not, your appreciation for the 32GB USB stick collecting dust on your desk is bound to grow!

We’ve covered [Michael]’s exploits before, and you may wish to check out the Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk or the Ultimate Gameboy Talk. Do you have your own favorite retrocomputer hacks and insights to share? Be sure to let us know via the Tip Line!

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A Floppy Controller For The Raspberry Pi

March 30, 2021 by Lewin Day 26 Comments

The Raspberry Pi is the darling single board computer that is everything to everyone. It even has lit up the eyes of the older set with the Pi 400 mimicking the all-in-one keyboard computer design so popular in the 1980s. Another project that harkens back to that golden era is this Raspberry Pi floppy controller board from [Dr. Scott M. Baker].

[Scott] is no stranger to floppy controllers, having worked with the popular WD37C65 floppy controller IC before with the RC2014 homebrew Z80 computer. Thus, it was his part of choice when looking to implement a floppy interface on the Raspberry Pi. The job was straightforward, and done with just the IC itself. Despite the Pi running at 3.3 V and the controller at 5 V, [Scott] has found no problems thus far, implementing just a resistor pack to try and limit damage from the controller sending higher voltage signals back to the Pi. With that said, he plans to implement a proper level shifter down the road to ensure trouble-free operation long term.

The project is rounded out with a bunch of Python tools used to interface with the controller, available on Github. Performance is limited by the non-realtime nature of the Raspberry Pi’s user mode operation, which [Scott] notes could be fixed with a kernel module. With that said, if you’re looking for performance, floppies aren’t it anyway.

We do love the Pi put to use in retro tasks; it can even be a SCSI Swiss Army Knife if you need one. Video after the break.

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Floppy Drive Keyboard Is Inefficient Fun

May 13, 2020 by Lewin Day 39 Comments

Most of us are used to a typical 101-key setup for typing on our machines. Mobile and touchscreen devices have offered alternative interfaces over the years, but generally still sticking to QWERTY or other similar layouts. [foone] cares not for convention however, building a text-entry device based on the iconic floppy disk.

The build starts with a standard PC floppy drive, hooked up to an interface board to allow it to work over USB. It’s hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, which runs a Python program that listens out for media insertion events. When a new disk is detected, it reads the volume label, and sends it over to a Teensy LC which simulates a USB keyboard attached to the host PC. The setup uses 29 disks, for A-Z, !, shift, and space. It’s all stuffed inside a SCSI disk enclosure which helpfully provides a power supply along with the classic beige 90s aesthetic.

While you’re probably not going to be typing out your dissertation on this thing, it makes for an excellent conversation piece. We’ve featured some of [foone]’s eclectic work before, too. Video after the break.

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