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  • Re: FC5025 5.25" USB floppy controller available

    From gary rockey@21:1/5 to schmidtd on Sun Apr 24 05:29:30 2022
    On Friday, February 19, 2010 at 11:45:49 AM UTC-5, schmidtd wrote:
    This came across my desk yesterday - I guess I get to "scoop" it:
    <quote>
    The FC5025 5.25" USB floppy controller is now available!
    Device Side Data's FC5025 USB 5.25" floppy controller plugs into a
    USB port and enables you to attach a 5.25" floppy drive. With the
    FC5025
    and its included software, you can read Apple, Atari, Commodore, MS-
    DOS,
    North Star and TI disks.
    For more information and to order, see the web site: http://www.deviceside.com
    Before ordering, please note the limitations described on the web
    site. In
    particular, the FC5025 is read-only; it can read floppies but it can't
    write
    to them.
    </quote>
    I'm not affiliated in any way, but I did succumb to a knee-jerk
    reaction to order one. That was before I remembered I don't have a
    1.2MB 5.25" floppy drive to hook up to it. ;-)

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  • From gary rockey@21:1/5 to gary rockey on Sun Apr 24 05:34:34 2022
    On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 8:29:31 AM UTC-4, gary rockey wrote:
    On Friday, February 19, 2010 at 11:45:49 AM UTC-5, schmidtd wrote:
    This came across my desk yesterday - I guess I get to "scoop" it:
    <quote>
    The FC5025 5.25" USB floppy controller is now available!
    Device Side Data's FC5025 USB 5.25" floppy controller plugs into a
    USB port and enables you to attach a 5.25" floppy drive. With the
    FC5025
    and its included software, you can read Apple, Atari, Commodore, MS-
    DOS,
    North Star and TI disks.
    For more information and to order, see the web site: http://www.deviceside.com
    Before ordering, please note the limitations described on the web
    site. In
    particular, the FC5025 is read-only; it can read floppies but it can't write
    to them.
    </quote>
    I'm not affiliated in any way, but I did succumb to a knee-jerk
    reaction to order one. That was before I remembered I don't have a
    1.2MB 5.25" floppy drive to hook up to it. ;-)
    Where might I get one of these 5.25 floppy adapters? Device Side Date is locked out. If anyone has one please contact me ...g. L. Rockey...web site wwwglrockey.com ..... email glrockey@att.net

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From gary rockey@21:1/5 to Michael J. Mahon on Sun Apr 24 05:18:55 2022
    On Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 9:05:41 PM UTC-5, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
    Dave Rawson wrote:
    Michael J. Mahon wrote:

    Next step--the two-sided index pulse mod... ;-)


    I'm happy to report (with long and tortuous detours of heroic
    proportion) that I've ported the oldest of my Apple sides over to PC as proof-of-concept. I purchased the FC5025 and the Teac FD55GFR and the combination worked. I took note of Mike's notes about ProDos being
    faster and it worked as well as ".dsk", so why not.

    CiderPress recognizes the disks as MagicWindow files and will
    automatically extract them to PC readable ".txt" files when requested!

    There are some eccentricities that I don't have the time or coherence enough to describe right now, but I can already imagine some possible approaches to dealing with them.

    So, I've read about 30 front sides and ache to read the backs. I've
    jumped the E2 to no avail. All the floppies are already punched for
    both sides since that's the way I used them.

    Has anyone been able to read the backs, punched and jumpered, yet?

    If so, is there any way to predict which of the FD55s allow this?
    Unfortunately, none. ;-(
    There are two ways to read the back sides:
    1) Cut out or punch two new "index access" holes in the jacket on
    the other side (laterally, not up/down) of the jacket. It should
    be in an angular position symmetric with the existing pair. This
    set of holes will allow the FD-55 index sensor to "see" the existing
    index hole in the disk media when the disk is upside down in the
    drive.
    2) Modify the FD-55 to either allow it to sense the index hold from
    either side (laterally, again) of the drive, or modify it to see
    "fake" index pulsed generated from the rotation of the spindle motor.
    (I'm still looking for the web article that described making these modifications.)
    As an incidental approach to bad sector reads, has anyone tried the "browse" option which allows working file by file, if necessary, so that
    a whole ".dsk" image isn't 'bad' or necessary?
    I haven't tried any disks with bad sectors, but a quick perusal of
    the code of the host program suggests that all the good sectors are
    copied to the image, with only the bad sectors represented as either
    zeroes or some random data (I don't know which, and haven't done the experiment).
    If this is the case, even a "bummer" image will have all that the
    program could recover in "file mode".
    BTW, in my experience, the vast majority of disks with "bad sectors"
    are ultimately recoverable with unusual means, so don't throw them
    out if you might want the contents!
    Thanks again to everyone for their encouragement and help!
    I'm very happy to hear that you are recovering your data. ;-)
    -michael
    NadaNet and AppleCrate II: parallel computing for Apple II computers!
    Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon
    "The wastebasket is our most important design
    tool--and it's seriously underused."

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  • From fadden@21:1/5 to gary rockey on Sun Apr 24 08:14:19 2022
    On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 5:34:35 AM UTC-7, gary rockey wrote:
    Where might I get one of these 5.25 floppy adapters? Device Side Date is locked out. If anyone has one please contact me ...g. L. Rockey...web site wwwglrockey.com ..... email glro...@att.net

    This thread is from about 12 years ago.

    Various options are available now, depending on what you want to accomplish. For physical disk access, https://applesaucefdc.com/hardware/ may be what you need.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From David Schmidt@21:1/5 to gary rockey on Mon Apr 25 11:22:17 2022
    On 4/24/22 8:34 AM, gary rockey wrote:
    [...]
    Where might I get one of these 5.25 floppy adapters? Device Side Date is locked out.

    It is not... but the site doesn't have an SSL certificate, which your
    browser may or may not care for. Here's the page for ordering - which
    involves an email:
    http://shop.deviceside.com/policy.html#contact

    I don't have any idea if stock is still available, but the web page
    makes it look that way.

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  • From =?UTF-8?B?R2FycmV0dCBNZWllcnM=?=@21:1/5 to All on Thu Apr 28 20:08:07 2022
    On Sun Apr 24 08:14:19 2022 fadden wrote:
    On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 5:34:35 AM UTC-7, gary rockey wrote:
    Where might I get one of these 5.25 floppy adapters? Device Side Date is locked out. If anyone has one please contact me ...g. L. Rockey...web site wwwglrockey.com ..... email glro...@att.net


    The problem with the FC5025, is it is read-only, and doesn't support the 2nd side of a flippy disk due to the indexing.

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