News Adafruit designs Raspberry Pi RP2040 floppy drive emulator

[Admin]

Adafruit has designed a floppy drive PCB that uses an RP2040 with the ability to emulate a real floppy drive.

Adafruit designs Raspberry Pi RP2040 floppy drive emulator : Read more

 

[Co BIY]

There must be some functional purpose that I am not imagining here ?

 

[edwardcrutchley5]

Archiving floppy programs or porting them to newer operating systems are the most relevant ones that come to mind. Some people actually clean up and fix the old code, optimizing them with newer code.

 

[edzieba]

There must be some functional purpose that I am not imagining here ?

There are plenty of devices that were built when 3.5" drives were the de-facto standard and are still in use today, e.g. lab equipment, mixing desks, digital signage systems, etc. These pieces of equipment are often too expensive to be replaced purely because you want shiny new stuff that does the same job, but the lack of newly manufactured 3.5" media and drives means they are becoming less and less maintainable and degradation of existing 3.5" media can risk loss of functionality. An FDD emulator means you can use newly manufactured interface hardware, commodity storage (e.g. SD cards), and keep media backed up with replication in the event of loss, damage or failure being trivial.

Plus, old PCs used as retro toys, I guess.

 

[Scootz_r]

"This isn't the first time Adafruit has used a Raspberry Pi to... "

should be corrected to:

"This isn't the first time Adafruit has used a Raspberry Pi Pico to...


The Raspberry Pi Foundation did no one any favors when they decided to use identical product names for both the single-board computer, and the microcontroller.

 

[vancouverizer]

There must be some functional purpose that I am not imagining here ?

Other common devices include digital pianos, synthesizers, typewriters, and CNC machines.