I want to put 5 1/2 Drivers on my future PC.

[eerie5]

This is more of a theory but i think it could be possible with the right software we could make a pc that can work with the 5 1/2 drives, like floppy drives for example.

 

 maybe this oddware cassette deck from the 2000s as well, i want to know your wisdom on this people of the LTT fourms

[Kilrah]

There are still cases with 5 1/4 slots although they're starting to get rare.

 

Software won't help you if there's no hardware to conect things to, so first is to decide what you want and figure out if the interface for it still exists.

[eerie5]

7 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

There are still cases with 5 1/4 slots although they're starting to get rare.

 

Software won't help you if there's no hardware to conect things to, so first is to decide what you want and figure out if the interface for it still exists.

i'm not really much of a savant when it comes to hardware, can you expand on what you mean by "the interface" 

[OhioYJ]

16 minutes ago, eerie5 said:

This is more of a theory but i think it could be possible with the right software

You likely don't need software at all actually. As someone who still regularly use physical media, all but one of my PCs in the house have 5.25" bays that are occupied (only my son's PC does not).  Floppy drives still work as well in every OS Ive used recently.

 

As for your oddware device, not sure about that one, as not sure what it is. However a owner of a NewQ platinum which is a similar type device, and plays radio, no software was needed. Audio cables go straight to the rear of the PC. My PC audio went into it, and the speakers also went to that panel. 

[Holmes108]

9 minutes ago, eerie5 said:

i'm not really much of a savant when it comes to hardware, can you expand on what you mean by "the interface" 

 

The types of data and power cables to connect it to your motherboard. Many physical drives take SATA which motherboards still support. But older ones may require an IDE ribbon style cable, for instance, which would require an adapter.

[SpookyCitrus]

@eerie5 Is there a reason why you want/need the ability to use floppy disks/cassette deck? Such old hardware isn't used anymore and most floppy drives are going to be expired or inoperable anyway. Do you have like an old stock pile or it it just something you want to tinker with? Most of the older interfaces out there have USB adapters so depending on what you're trying to do that might be a cheaper/easier option. 

[da na]

You won't need any software.

What you will need though is:

-Floppy header on the motherboard for floppy drives

-IDE header on the motherboard for certain CD drives

-SCSI card with one of the 20 non-intercompatible interfaces:( for certain optical drives and accessories

-Molex power for all of those

[8tg]

There’s nothing super special to get most of these items to work besides physical adapters. Modern motherboards still have floppy controllers built into their chipsets because it’s still just a redundant fallback to boot from floppy. Though now it’s just built into usb.

If you plug a usb floppy disk into your modern pc, it’ll still try and boot from it first.

 

This is why your windows install is still drive C. As far as windows is concerned, A and B are floppy drives. Though now it uses A and B for other purposes as well, it kinda boots the same way where it’s booting from A as if it were a floppy. And if you have a floppy drive installed, it’s automatically assigned drive A.

 

So you’d always have a floppy device for whatever item is recognized as drive A over the floppy controller or the floppy controller to usb. Most usb 3.5” floppy drives do this.

If you have a 5.25” floppy drive it will work the same with the right adapters, 5.25” floppy drive combination cable to a floppy header on the motherboard. And you can adapt the nonexistent floppy header to a pci (though I don’t think pcie) card or over usb. And it’ll work the same as any usb 3.5” drive. Whatever arrangement it has on the floppy cable, it’ll be A or B.

 

And the same applies for non floppy devices in much simpler terms. There are PCI ide and scsi controller cards so you can just plug and play most other 5.25” drives. Things like Zip drives still work just plugged in without software on any modern windows install, including internal ones.

My syquest SparQ will work on anything with a parallel port, driverless.

 

5.25” devices aren’t that complicated compared to modern hardware, they’re from a time where the communication between them and the host system was intentionally simplified to be mostly universal, and because that’s how it was for so long, it’s just built into any computer to work that way still. 

[GOTSpectrum]

25 minutes ago, da na said:

-SCSI card with one of the 20 non-intercompatible interfaces:( for certain optical drives and accessories

Oh god don't remind me 

[eerie5]

44 minutes ago, SpookyCitrus said:

@eerie5 Is there a reason why you want/need the ability to use floppy disks/cassette deck? Such old hardware isn't used anymore and most floppy drives are going to be expired or inoperable anyway. Do you have like an old stock pile or it it just something you want to tinker with? Most of the older interfaces out there have USB adapters so depending on what you're trying to do that might be a cheaper/easier option. 

i just think their neat, i have a Roland Mt90s, which is a midi player that uses floppy disks  (image is just a random ebay listing example)

[eerie5]

1 hour ago, OhioYJ said:

You likely don't need software at all actually. As someone who still regularly use physical media, all but one of my PCs in the house have 5.25" bays that are occupied (only my son's PC does not).  Floppy drives still work as well in every OS Ive used recently.

 

As for your oddware device, not sure about that one, as not sure what it is. However an owner of a NewQ platinum which is a similar type device, and plays radio, no software was needed. Audio cables go straight to the rear of the PC. My PC audio went into it, and the speakers also went to that panel. 

oddware is mostly weird hardware or programs for computers, but this is helpful!

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, eerie5 said:

This is more of a theory but i think it could be possible with the right software we could make a pc that can work with the 5 1/2 drives, like floppy drives for example.

 

Floppy, IDE(PATA), SATA and USB are all different.

 

Floppies can literately be transferred over USB 1.1 , they're like 30KB/sec at most. IDE tops out at 133MB (or about half of where 7200RPM drives hit) and SATA tops out at 520MB/sec.

 

There is nothing preventing a 5.25" drive USB working in a PC other than lack of interest. But also this only works if you need to access the DATA, not copy protection/protected disks.

 

Copy protection literately needs the original media in the original vintage hardware because it does screwy things at the controller level.

 

ODD (eg CD/DVD/Blueray) drives come in IDE, SATA and USB formats already. So nothing new, and often the "slim" varieties are just SATA with a USB-to-SATA bridge chip anyway, like you would find in a external hard drive chassis.

 

Then you have things like ZIP and JAZ drives and various other animals which came in Parallel port, IDE and SCSI models.  

 

Most of the 5.25" floppies that were external at some point, that you historically saw, were proprietary, and used a  non-standard serial interface (eg C64 1541's are serial port driven but have their own 6502 CPU), Tandy TRS80 and Tandy 1000 used proprietary drives. 

 

The only standard floppy drives you will find are post-286 era. Fortunately they're also generally backwards compatible with the same physical media (exception being Commodore and Mac drives, which can read PC formatted diskettes but PC's can't read Commodore and Mac diskettes.)