Floppy Emulator Usb Driver
Easy Floppy to USB Upgrade Eliminate your need for 3 ½ floppies with this 3 ½ floppy-to-USB disk drive! The LED 99 version not included standard - Upgrade to the LED 99 VERSION SHOWN for $50.00 more! Our 3 ½ floppy disk drive to USB flash drive reader converter will replace your existing floppy drive with an independently operated USB flash drive reader. No additional changes to your system are needed besides removing the existing drive and replacing it with this drive.
- Floppy to usb emulator to replace floppy drive at the original. USB port: connect usb flash drive Floppy driver with below function.
- USB floppy disk drive emulator N-Drive. No additional drivers need it. N-Drive – Nalbantov USB floppy disk drive emulator. USB flash drive – Formatted.
Replace the Floppy Disk on your instrument with a powerful USB Port!!!!! A new accessory is now available for all instruments equipped with a Floppy Disk Drive!
Plug and Play. Easy installation and no system configuration or debugging required.
If you do not know what type to order from the Upgrade Chart, then please review our which will give you the USB code # to order. BE SURE TO SELECT THE CORRECT DRIVE DEPENDING ON YOUR APPLICATION!
IF YOU SELECT THE WRONG DRIVE THEN IT MIGHT NOT WORK ON YOUR DEVICE. Easy Floppy to USB Upgrade Eliminate your need for 3 ½ floppies with this 3 ½ floppy-to-usb disk drive! Our 3 ½ floppy disk drive to USB flash drive reader convertor will replace your existing floppy drive with an independently operated USB flash drive reader.
No additional changes to your system are needed besides removing the existing drive and replacing it with this drive. The LED 99 version not included standard - Upgrade to the LED 99 VERSION SHOWN for $50.00 more! Plug and Play. Easy installation and no system configuration or debugging required. The drive emulates your existing floppy drive to act as if the floppy drive was never removed. This drive should replace most any existing 720k/1.44MB capacity IBM format floppy drive or your money back. 28 or 32 pin ribbon cables systems available and will connect to your existing power and data cables.
Not only will this device work in PCs but, it will also work in machinery or devices that still use floppy drives. This device completely replaces the universal floppy drive of computerized system.
If you are wondering if our device will work with your equipment, then just ask! When purchasing this device, at checkout please let us know what make and model of equipment this drive will be going into and/or the floppy drive it will be replacing to ensure we are selling the correct device for your machine type.
Please let us know what model you will need by reviewing the. If you do not know what type to order from the Upgrade Chart, then please review our which will give you the USB code # to order. IBM is the standard device. If you are not sure which device you need, you can continue the checkout and one of our sales reps will contact you.
After covering a bucket-load of information about saving floppy disks using the Kryoflux, my friend George asked me whether I had used, or come across, a floppy disk emulator which uses a USB stick as the storage media and whether it could be useful to move files from a PC without modern connectivity. In fact, I had purchased one a while back, and I tested it, and I intended to blog about it. I just never got around to it! I never completely worked out how it “worked” either.
But I guess there isn’t a better time to give it a go. The Unit The floppy emulator in question is from eBay. In fact, the picture on the eBay posting couldn’t be more honest – as it includes the masking tape over the display which I subsequently removed. It features a two-digit 7-segment display on the front panel which displays 00 to 99 for a total of 100 floppies. It also features a Green LED for power and a Red LED for access, and two push buttons – one to increment the floppy being accessed, another to decrement. And of course, the most important port – the USB port. The body of the drive is some black plastic, and feels moderately solid with some unthreaded screwholes for mounting if one wishes.
The two halves of the case are secured by four screws through the body of the unit. The rear has the regular 34 pin interface, with no shroud, and a provision for a Berg connector for power. Pin 1 of the interface is on the left when viewed from the rear. There is a warranty sticker, but at a cost about $20, I couldn’t care about violating this, as it would cost me more to post it back registered than to absorb the loss. Internally, it is a single PCB contraption. The PCB is marked There are a few jumper headers available, most of them are unmarked and all are undocumented. I’m willing to bet that some of them control drive select B or A.
Well, one seems to be marked “ready” but I have no idea there. It looks like the board has a provision for SPI flash mounting but that wasn’t populated. Already we can see an which is likely used as a buffer against USB transfer delays. We can also see in the rear, a load of resistors (probably pull up for the interface) and a which may be used to latch and drive control signals on the 34 pin interface. The rest of the board is populated by WCH chips. I believe this is a product.
The chips include:. CH538Q. – LED drive and keyboard control chip. CH411G It seems the main chips are not documented in any way that I can find, which is a bit of a disappointment because we can’t find out what else they might be capable of – so I’ll look at what it does in the “as shipped” state. Looking at the bottom of the PCB reveals no surprises. There’s nothing active back there.
Using it in Practice It didn’t come with any documentation. I suppose it is simple enough that a monkey could work it out, but there are a few intricate details about this particular unit’s implementation which would be nice to have documented by the manufacturer, and the jumper settings too. When there is no USB key connected, it sits there displaying c4 on the display. Once you insert a key, it will enumerate it while display c5, then c6, and then 00 when it is ready for access, indicating disk 00 is mounted. All disks are writable, and no write protection is available – so a system could always ruin the data on your “virtual” floppies.
As far as I can tell, almost any memory stick seems to work. A little more on that in a bit, but it should be 256Mb or larger (as 128Mb isn’t enough). Pressing the up/down button allows you to change the active floppy disk from 00 to 99. This cannot be changed while the activity light is on. When using any random USB key which is already formatted, position 00 will appear to be a large floppy disk – the size of the USB key. We can explain why later, but it will not function correctly in this mode!
You will get erratic read and write errors, so don’t expect it to be an easy way to connect a large amount of storage to your older computer in that regard. However, you can (and should) format the slots you wish to use and read/write to them like you would when using the machine with old fashioned floppy disks.
For this, it works just fine on this machine. I tested it with my old box running Windows 95 as it’s capable of writing custom formats with Winimage. By trying to format as 160Kb, 180Kb, 320Kb, 360Kb, 720Kb, 822kb, 1440Kb, 1680Kb, DMF 1024, DMF 2048 and 1720Kb formats, I could see what formats it would support. Doing this revealed that this emulator only supports 1.44Mb MFM format.
Attempts at other formats produced failures in verify. This means that this emulator is suitable for IBM/PC high density (and compatible machines using this format) 3.5″ floppy emulation only. What does the above mean? It means your controller must expect 300rpm, and produce an MFM signal at 500kbit/s, encoding 18 sectors per track with sync as used in the IBM/PC.
Unfortunately, there’s no chance of supporting copy protected or DMF installation floppies, or double density or GCR formats used by other machines. It’s quite limited in this regard, but that could turn out to be a blessing Working out the Format Now that we’ve gotten this far, it’s a valid question to ask – how is the USB key formatted?
Floppy Emulator Usb Drivers Windows 10
Is it a stack of image files on a FAT32 key with specific names? When you plug in a key formatted with this emulator, you will be presented by the OS with a superfloppy key (i.e. Partition-table-less) of 1.44Mb. This represents the contents of bank 00. So, it would seem that the data from the disks is converted to its binary image form and stored directly on the USB key without a file system or partition table.
Usb To Floppy Drive Emulator
For this experiment, I filled a USB key with 0xBAADF00D to “seed” the disk with values identifying areas unused by the emulator. I then plugged the key into the emulator and formatted bank 00, 01, 02, 03, 04 and 99. Then I examined, using a hex editor, and searched for 0x55AA (the boot signature for the boot sector) to find the beginning of each of the disks. The results are as follows:. Image 00 – 0h. Image 01 – 180000h.
Image 02 – 300000h. Image 03 – 480000h. Image 04 – 600000h. Image 99 – 9480000h The numbers represent the number of bytes, in hex from the beginning of the USB key. Notice how each of the images are separated by 180000h? This isn’t expected.
A quick revise of the IBM PC HD geometry suggests the image should be: 80 tracks. 18 sectors per track.
2 sides. 512 bytes per sector = 1474560 bytes = 168000h bytes But it appears the images on the drive are 1572864 bytes. Maybe this implies that this emulator can emulate 85 tracks (0-84 at 18 sectors per track)? I haven’t been able to test this. Another explanation appears to be a hardware implementation aid to make the arithmetic easier in binary, as the space between 168000h and 180000h hasn’t been touched and still contains my seeded value of 0xBA AD F0 0D. Therefore the images occupy the space between 0h – 9 600 000h (i.e.
0 to 157,286,400 bytes = 153600 KiB = 150MiB). So this is why you should use a USB key of 150MiB, the next common size is 256Mb. Generating your own key from images Given the information above, technically inclined users should easily be able to make their own 100-disk images. But in case you aren’t – I’ll try to give you some hints, but just be aware that dd is nasty if you make a typo. It will destroy your data mercilessly, so make sure you’ve typed it right, and you know what you’re doing.
Of course, naturally, things are easiest in Linux, parts of this can be accomplished in Windows under Cygwin along with other tools. I’ll try to cater to both audiences in the one write-up. I’ve used 1024 bytes as the block size, even though the disks are 512 byte sectored as it makes little difference except to the calculations to reduce the numbers – i.e. With bs=512, count=2880 or with bs=1024, count=1440 reducing overhead and improving speed. Scenario 1: We want to build a new 100-disk image from scratch Step 1: Build a zeroed file called mergedimages.img of the right size to hold all 100 floppies in the format used by the emulator dd if=/dev/zero of=mergedimages.img bs=1024 count=153600 Step 2: Copy 1440kB from to the mergedimages.img at the right offset of. Dd if= of=mergedimage.img bs=1024 count=1440 seek= conv=notrunc e.g. Lets say we want to copy an image called thisone.img into a 100-disk image called mergedimages.img to slot number 70.
Dd if=thisone.img of=mergedimage.img bs=1024 count=1440 seek=107520 conv=notrunc In this command, it doesn’t matter if your Kryoflux disk images are larger than 1440k because it imaged the manufacturers mark data in Track 80, as dd will only copy the first 1440k (due to the use of bs=1024 and count=1440 arguments). Step 3: Copy the whole mergedimages.img to the USB key itself. You must make sure the key is not currently mounted (umount it if necessary).
The use of bs=4M is to improve copy speeds, but the actual size of the block is irrelevant. Please double check you have the right drive. If doing this under Windows, you should use instead. Dd if=mergedimage.img of= bs=4M e.g. If your USB key is at /dev/sdc, then the command would be dd if=mergedimage.img of=/dev/sdc bs=4M Scenario 2: We want to backup the 100 disk set from the USB key Under Linux, just issue the following to backup all 100 disks from to imagebackup.img dd if= of=imagebackup.img bs=1024 count=153600 If you want to image just one slot to onedisk.img then, dd if= of=onedisk.img bs=1024 count=1440 skip= It’s not as easy on the Windows side. It would probably be best to use Win32DiskImager to image the whole disk to a file, and use the file as the if argument in the dd commands above.
Scenario 3: We want to replace one disk of the 100 disk set on the USB key with another image You can do this directly under Linux. Under Windows, you will have to image-modify-rewrite. Dd if= of= bs=1024 count=1440 seek= Scenario 4: You want to generate a new floppy, inject a file, and write that file to the 100 disk image Under Windows, you can use Winimage to build.IMG files in the 1440k format, and drag and drop files into it.
Under Linux, use mkfs.msdos as shown in to make your images. Once you have your images, use the above techniques to inject them into the emulator. If you’re lazy, here’s the computed offset figures for the seek/skip arguments: Slot Offset (Decimal) 0 0 1 1536 2 3072 3 4608 4 6144 5 7680 6 9216 7 10752 8 12288 9 1380 11 1682 13 1994 15 2306 17 2618 19 2910 21 3222 23 3534 25 3846 27 4148 29 4450 31 4762 33 5064 35 5376 37 5688 39 5990 41 6292 43 6604 45 6916 47 7218 49 7520 51 7832 53 8144 55 8446 57 8758 59 9060 61 9362 63 9674 65 99864 I have tested most of the commands above and for me, it works. You need to be careful and understand what you are doing, I cannot guarantee everything above.
But I did easily inject my MS-DOS 6.22 install disks (4) and Windows 3.11 Install Disks (8) into an image and write it to my USB using the methods above without a hassle! Conclusion This emulator is a mixed blessing. It’s cheap, and it’s easily bought, and the image format is in sector format making it easy to inject images now that I’ve worked to understand how it operates.
But it’s incapable of different geometries and encodings, or densities. It’s really only suitable for things which read and write high density 3.5″ floppies in IBM/PC format. There are other cheap emulators on the market like other 3 digit types and ones with no display.
Unfortunately, as most of the listings are written by Chinese eBay listers, they’re not really familiar with their products and cannot offer help or support to try and interpret the non-sensical things implied in the product descriptions. I’ve (this one is a 1000 floppy emulator) just to find out how it works, but I’m anticipating a very similar result. There were some more expensive hobbyist creations which held the data as a custom format which replicated the written waveform, but these aren’t easily loaded to without copying to the actual drive from a compatible system at floppy rates, so at least the type examined has a bit of an advantage that you can just load up the image data to a USB key by crafting a “supersized” image file and writing it directly to a USB key without a filesystem. Maybe I should hook up the emulator the Kryoflux to see what the output is 300RPM perfectly with 100% timings? I would expect that given the non-mechanical nature of the emulator but that’s an experiment for another day. How do you mean by “eject floppy”?
The emulator itself doesn’t emulate an eject as such (as IBM compatible floppy drives never had software eject), but if you toggle “up” or “down” the banks of virtual disks, it acts as if it’s swapped the disks. I’m not sure the status of the change detect line (which is used to signal to the host that the disk has been changed). I’m not sure what the record format of the SF3 is – whether it’s MFM for High Density disks like used in IBM/PC or custom, so suitability is still questionable. If you mean start up at a non 00 bank on cold start, I don’t think it’s possible. You may have to boot with 00, toggle to bank you need, then hit the reset on the console. As long as it doesn’t interrupt the 5v line to the drive, it won’t cause it to jump back to 00. Perhaps if you have a multimeter, you might be able to determine the reason for this.
I suspect the Drive-Select (/DS) line is being tied down by the keyboard as it doesn’t anticipate another drive needing to be selected (i.e. Was never built to support two floppy drives). As a result, you can probably modify the ribbon to the drive to add a switch to the /DS line and “break” the line when you want to change disk by toggling the switch. Whether your keyboard will detect the disk change is another story, as the emulator might not output the disk change line necessary.
As a result, you might need to add another switch to another connection to toggle it to inform the keyboard that a disk change occurred. Of course, explore any of these modifications at your own risk. Dear Jack, Thanks for your valuable contribution. Indeed, it appears that IPCAS is reselling similar/identical devices – I looked at their support downloads and it looks like some of them may even be suitable for the version I had received, however, some of the information they have may or may not apply since these devices may come in different versions.
Definitely won’t hurt to try:). The PCB image in their PDF is a bit different.
I will probably investigate the Density Select jumper in the future when time permits, and retry using 1.2MB (80×15) format when I can. One surprise is just how much IPCAS charges – €250!!! April 2013 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 12 14 15 16 17 23 25 27 28 29 30. Archives. (14).
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Samsung Usb Driver
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