I read "Notes on Floppy Disks" <<a href="https://extrapages.de/archives/20190102-Floppy-notes.html>" rel="nofollow">https://extrapages.de/archives/20190102-Floppy-notes.html></a> last night. It, along with this, really makes the technology seem much more accessible to a non-electronics professional like me. These help make the various floppy emulator devices I've got for my retro-computing habits seem more understandable. (It also really makes me want to build some electronics skills, too!)
A related project that has been going through an amazing amount of progress is the Applesauce Floppy Disk Controller.<p>HN Thread here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17256709" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17256709</a><p>IMO the coolest part is the widget they wrote to visualize the raw magnetic flux on the floppy.<p>Example image: <a href="https://twitter.com/a2_4am/status/1026110390491643904" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/a2_4am/status/1026110390491643904</a>
For those interested, the actual specifications of floppy disks are freely available from the ECMA:<p><a href="http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Standardwithdrawn.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Sta...</a><p><a href="http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Standard.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Sta...</a><p>The standardese term is "Flexible Disk Cartridges", and the units are in Metric, but those documents basically provide almost all the information needed to build a disk drive or interpret the data on one.<p>The CD and DVD specs are there too.
while impressive, I wonder where people take the time to explore ancient tech in-depth. work, family, more work. how much time do you guys have?<p>besides, writing a n64 emulator, yes! fixing a decades old Sun, Xerox or VT terminal, yes! emulating old 8bit cpus in JS yes!<p>but who wants to understand/explore a floppy drive?? no offense, curious what's so interesting about floppy drives compared to typical retro tech stuff I mentioned above?
So it seems it still needs an actual floppy drive, but controls it in a better way to read it more reliably?<p>I wonder how hard it is to build something that reads the magnetic signal, or what's left of it, directly from the floppy platter