I'm not sure which box it's in at the moment, but that reminds me of an NEC 90MHz Pentium laptop I have. Back then, there were a lot of ideas around having bays where you could plug in a floppy drive, or a CD drive, or an extra hard drive, or an extra battery.
I suspect that you're looking at a standard laptop floppy mechanism with a "floppy header to proprietary connector" adaptor stuck on the back, similar to how USB hard drives are standard PATA/SATA drives with a PATA/SATA-to-USB adapter built into the external housing.
That said, given that half of the wires on a 34-pin floppy cable are ground lines, two are reserved for future uses that never came to pass, two are drive select lines, each drive has its own motor enable line, etc., I could easily see that being a passive adaptor with maybe a few diodes or resistors to handle the "missing" pins.
If I remember correctly, my own laptop's bay had a row of connectors at the back and each module engaged with one of them, meaning that one was a proprietary floppy connector, and another was either a proprietary PATA connector or one of those proprietary CD interfaces you see on old SoundBlaster cards. (I only have the floppy and CD modules.)
If you want/need a floppy drive, buy a USB external variant for $5-$12....
I'd skip the assorted adapters and trying to use one worth 50 cents from some old laptop, etc..
A lot of actual floppy media, even if new, is now potentially corroded/rusting anyway...
Floppies use a magnetic oxide. If you ignore the fact that it's not technically rust (some people get annoyed at platter hard drives being referred to as "rotating rust drives"), they're corroded/rusted from the day they're manufactured.
Aside from the magnetic flux patterns weakening or getting smeared by exposure to a magnet, the physical degradations you have to worry about are binder failure (the glue that holds the oxide to the plastic platter giving up the ghost, causing the read head to scrape the oxide off when it tries to read the disk) and mold (it's hard to see the spidery patterns unless you get the light just right, but it turns out that certain molds like the binder as a growth medium).
I
seriously doubt I could get the light right to photograph an example of mold, given how hard it is to get the angle just right for even the naked eye, but I could take a picture of what happens when you put a disk with binder failure in the drive if you want.
As for smeared flux from exposure to a magnet, I don't want to erase one of my floppies right now, but
this disk that came bad looks like a likely example. (It was an eBay purchase I had to get refunded.)
That said, statistically speaking, floppies can hold up surprisingly well... especially the older ones from before they axed the manufacturing QA to save money in the 2000s. (Which is good, because that's the era of "this game never got a CD-ROM release")
If you're not planning to buy a
Kryoflux, I'd advise just buying two or three of those cheap Chinese USB floppy drives.
(When floppies get old, little calibration differences in the read heads of the drives become significant in whether all sectors on the disk are readable. The first USB floppy drive I bought reads almost all my floppies beautifully. The second USB floppy I bought has trouble with a lot of them, but does a beautiful job on most of the ones the first one has trouble with. The desktop floppy in my AST Adventure! 210 P133 retro-machine is sort of in between the two in terms of what it has trouble with. I haven't yet tried enough disks with my Kryoflux to know what the calibration is on the NEC floppy drive from the mid 2000s that I eBayed for it.)
The only reason I needed a Kryoflux when I already had USB floppy drives and the Linux ddrescue utility was for some old Macintosh floppies (instead of the MFM encoding DOS/Windows floppies use, pre-1.44MB Mac floppies use a GCR-based low-level encoding which assumes a drive that can vary its spindle speed to pack 400K on a 360K floppy and 800K on a 720K floppy by packing things more densely on the outer tracks. The Kryoflux works around that by sampling the raw flux readings from the floppy drive heads at high resolution and translating in software.) and a copy of The Four Crystals of Trazere on two 720K
floppies with on-disk copy protection.
(Floppy drives don't have any internal controller chips the way IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) drives do. They use the same "put the controller electronics on the motherboard or a controller card" strategy as the old MFM RLL hard drives designed around the same time, which means that the pins are raw connections to the head-moving motors and read heads. That's why things like the Kryoflux and
musical floppy drive ensembles [2] are so possible.)
That said,
Microsoft and
IBM also did some trickery to pack more data on some disks, which a USB floppy drive won't recognize, and there existed tools to allow an average user to do that too.
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