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Adafruit is constant its efforts to create open supply controllers for floppy disk drives, this time demonstrating a submission to the FluxEngine venture for writing bootable Apple II disks on an unmodified PC floppy drive.
“On this demo, [Jeff Epler] makes use of a typical PC 5.25″ floppy drive (TEAC mannequin FD-55GFR) related with the Adafruit Floppy Board to put in writing a floppy disk with a basic academic recreation downloaded from archive.org: Quantity Munchers,” the corporate writes of its newest demo.
The performance is notable for one easy cause: Classic Apple methods, together with the Apple II for which Quantity Munchers was written, use a totally totally different disk format than commonplace IBM-compatible PCs. Consequently, studying or writing the disks historically required specialised {hardware} — now replaceable with a easy microcontroller and an easy-to-find IBM-compatible floppy drive.
“Beforehand,” the corporate explains, “we have demonstrated how utilizing the Adafruit Floppy interface you possibly can learn and write disks for PC and Commodore 64, and in addition learn disks for Mac together with crunchy previous 400kB and 800kB floppies, which PCs have historically been unable to learn.”
Adafruit has been engaged on its floppy drive venture since final 12 months, saying again in January the discharge of code supporting Arduino boards as floppy drive controllers — and, thus, the creation of an open supply USB floppy drive.
The corporate is standing on the shoulders of giants: Its efforts, created in partnership with Epler, lean on earlier open supply initiatives together with GreaseWeazle and FluxEngine — the latter of which is, with Epler’s new code in place, used for Apple II disk writing.
Extra particulars can be found in Adafruit’s YouTube video, whereas the Adafruit Floppy venture is printed to GitHub below the permissive MIT license.
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