As a kid in 1998, I was given an old IBM PS/2 to play games on. It only had one problem: with no USB (naturally) and no optical drive in it, I could not add more games to the hard drive, since the floppy drive didn’t work properly. However, I was curious to see an orange light come on, instead of the more familiar green, and there was “2.88” written on its eject button. What… [more]
Earlier this year I’ve got a cheap old Amiga 500 for tinkering purposes. Now, I never really had any Commodore paraphernalia around here, and my first PC was a 486 to play games on, but – some of my DOS favorites were actually ported from an Amiga, so I have decided to give this one a try… [more]
About a year ago I made a small project to see if I could make an old floppy controller chip, salvaged from a PC card, talk to an Arduino Mega board that I had left over from a 3D printer setup. With that being a success, I’ve extended the project to include 8-inch drives and 2.88MB PS/2 diskettes. One last step before I run out of RAM is to include ImageDisk support!… [more]
As a follow-up to my previous article about the IBM PCjr and its quirks and features, I have decided to create KeybJr – a small open-source project, that allows the PCjr to use a regular keyboard of the era, through both cable or the infrared link. This is because the system did not contain any provisions of connecting a normal PC keyboard… [more]
In other words, finding a more creative use for the Arduino Mega than a neon clock: to be able to read and write all sorts of old data storage media and send’em over USB, blending old technology with new.
Originally inspired by the ArduinoFDC project, I have decided to try a different approach: instead of using the Arduino to talk to a floppy drive directly, why not leave the hard … [more]
I have once stumbled upon an interesting article from 2018 published on retrocmp.de, discussing about provisions on connecting an 8″ floppy disk drive to a PC. You know, those huge “boat anchors” that accept flexible disks just four inches shy of an LP record, in exchange of a couple of hundred kilobytes data storage. That sort of type.… [more]