One sad reminder about this relic of a technology - it's slow! Fortunately, even though some of these disks were well over 25 years old, they were of a higher quality than the floppies made in the late 90s (which tended to be a whole lot less unreliable). I was able to create a disk image off of a floppy, as well. It was able to see any functioning disk I used (both 1.44MB and 720K). When I went over to a PC (running Windows 7), it was able to see both the 1.44MB and another 720K disk which did work.Īt home I tried another experiment and hooked the drive up to an older iMac running Snow Leopard. But Disk Utility did see the 1.44MB disk appear. The Mac didn't initially seem to have any luck with the 720K disk (I later discovered that particular disk was probably dead, since Windows couldn't read it either). The Micro Center staff was accommodating to let me try it out and see if my 1.44MB and 720K disks worked on Mac and/or PC. The back of the drive identifies as a Model: FD-05PUB. Disk Utility identifies this as the Y-E DATA USB-FDU (USB floppy disk drive). This drive is similar to the package I picked up at Micro Center for around $15 USD (just without the IBM logo). One of the drives was in a nondescript, tan cardboard box that was easy to open up. I visited a Micro Center and they had two types of external USB floppy drives available. User comments were varied in how reliable these drives would be with the disks. Buying a drive off the internet and hoping that it would work with 720K disks was a bit of a gamble. I found a number of products like this which claimed to work with 1.44MB disks, but most products were not very clear if they did or did not work with the older 720K format. Since I haven't owned a computer with a floppy drive in it for many years, I went in search of an external floppy drive that would be able to read both 720K and 1.44MB disks. Most of my floppy disks were 720K or 1.44MB disks for the PC, with a handful of 800K Mac formatted disks. The last time I had done an archive was back in the late 90s, so it was a good idea to go through this process while there was still the necessary hardware available to back up these old relics of digital storage. Last year, I took on the arduous task of archiving around 200 old floppy disks. It’s fun though, and free to try out if you want to from the BigBoss repo.Archiving Mac Floppies 7th May 2018 | Tutorial It’s fun to see how much technology has progressed over the years, but for me personally, I don’t have much use for it. You can play some classic games and software on it, but unless you have digital copies yourself, your going to need to be doing a lot of searching at work to get it to work. It works great, and at sometimes even better than the original Macintoshes. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen with two fingers reveals the keyboard. And finally, there is an option to select which keyboard layout you want, as well as which machine you want to emulate. Below that is an option for using either a touchscreen or trackpad style input for the mouse. It can also be using for things such as the installation process, which can take a very long time running at the normal speed. They aren’t exactly fast by today’s standards. If your wondering why you would want to run at 2 times, 4 times, or even 8 times the normal speed, there is a really good reason for that, and that is that some of the operating systems that you can run are over 30 years old. The first option is at the speed of which to emulate. Swiping from the left to the right reveals a settings menu. Sadly, it always crashed for me whenever I tried to create or rename one on my iPad mini with iOS 8. You can swipe with two fingers from the right to the left to reveal a menu in which you can insert your virtual floppy disks, as well as create new ones, rename them, and remove them. Once you download it and add your ROM files, it works great! It appears that it has been around for a while, but it’s now been released on Cydia, so there is no more need for a Mac with Xcode to install it. Ever wanted to use Macintosh software from the 1980s on your iOS device? No? Well, thanks to a new package on Cydia, now you can. Mini vMac is a recently released package on Cydia made by developer Jesus A.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |