The HxC Floppy Emulator project main idea is to completely replace the floppy disk drive by an electronic device. See the showroom to have a preview of the currently supported machines. It now supports hundreds of machines and floppy formats. The project have grown with the various support requests received during all these years.
The front side of the device accepts a USB Stick, which acts like the floppy disk, but stores up to virtual floppy disk drives on the USB Stick, with each number representing the virtual floppy disk drive being accessed.Early s an alternative to the floppy disks was needed for these machines because the floppy support in PC machines started to disappear and the floppy disks reliability and quality was getting worse and worse.
The connections on the back of this FDD emulator are identical to that of the old floppy disk drives. The USB Floppy Emulator in 1 device is a direct replacement for the old legacy floppy diskette drives.
The Lotharek HxC emulators, along with the software that is available, in my opinion allows for the most flexibility with a wide range of applications.
There are many types of floppy drive formats and floppy drive types. Not all emulators will emulate all the various types of floppy drives. Here are some up front notes about floppy disk drive emulators that I think are important to note. Then you simply copy from one working floppy drive to the virtual floppy emulator. If you have to copy files from floppy disks to the virtual floppy disk emulator, the emulator can be set as Drive 1, or Drive 2, or both. By the way, there is a lot of open source software that can be used to create the virtual floppy disk image on the SD Card or the USB stick to begin with. Lotharek HxC floppy drive emulators come in a number of different versions.
In my opinion, they have filled the gap between the old floppy drive legacy machines and the new solid state storage device machines. In response to those emails, and thank you for sending all those emails to me by-the-way below is FDD information that I think many engineers and end users will find very useful and some possible solutions to the old legacy floppy disk drives. The unit will also need several hardware switches to emulate the various non-standard formats i. Because the FD drive interface uses control signals to physically step the motor and heads, the interface will need an MCU such as a Pic to act as a interpreter between the memory buffer k or 1. In fact the three floppy disk drive emulator devices shown below are designed for computers that do not have USB ports. No computer USB ports are required for operation. The floppy disk drive emulators replace these old legacy floppy disk drives with a simple plug-and-play emulator device. In other words, if the OEM computer has a standard 34 pin floppy disk drive cable, these devices are plug and play. These devices are not external USB floppy disk drives, but direct floppy disk drive replacements for internal original equipment manufacturers floppy disk drives. Updated information on the floppy disk drives hardware interfaces and FDD emulators to replace 3.