A local shop wanted my help - a customer had old documents on a Mac floppy. It had been years and years since I had my sights on a Mac with a floppy drive.<p>I figured I could help anyway. First, I checked that the floppies weren't in DOS/Windows format. A long shot, but for a short while it was not unheard of to use DOS floppies as the lingua franca between Macs and PCs.<p>Nah, that wasn't it. It was a real Mac floppy. No PC could read it.<p>A Greaseweazle to the rescue! Created a floppy image. But how to read it? Turns out there's a Mac emulator on the web you can just drop a floppy image into, complete with MS Word 5 for Mac to read the document, export it to RTF and Bob's your uncle!
Is this needed because motherboards no longer include any floppy drive channels?<p>I'm not yet grasping why Greaseweazle is better than a standard cheapy USB floppy drive.<p>Greaseweazle is undisputable an awesome name for a project, though.<p>Edit: Thanks for the clarifications :)
Also have a look at drawbridge which even supports live loading Amiga disks in an emulator. <a href="https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/</a>
See also, FluxEngine: <a href="http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/index.html</a><p>The hardware is just an off-the-shelf fpga dev board with the 34-pin connector soldered directly to it. That's it. No other components or pcb or anything.<p><a href="https://photos.app.goo.gl/aDKggy7UAHsyLj717" rel="nofollow">https://photos.app.goo.gl/aDKggy7UAHsyLj717</a><p>You extract pin #5 from the connector and solder the entire odd row to gnd (one wire and there is a gnd pad right at the end of the connector) and snap off the programmer board. Done.