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]
Derrick was a hybrid monolithic 16/32-bit kernel which I wrote in FASM in 2008, to learn myself low-level Intel x86 assembly along the way. Derrick can be executed on a machine equipped with at least an 80386 CPU, runs from a floppy disk and will execute everything in ring 0 to be as fast as possible… [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]
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]