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Old 02-07-2023, 04:24 PM
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MIPS MIPS is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2014
Location: West Canadia
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The easy answer: no.
While the 3.5" floppy drive lived long enough to get a version with a USB interface, 5.25" did not and because the idea of having a 5.25" floppy drive that you just plugged into a computer with a USB cable and it appeared in My Computer like it always did back in the day was apparently only seriously looked into within the last year there is no easy solution because there is no sort of USB to floppy interface or device driver that exists that "just works" like it does with the 3.5" drives. They (generic USB to floppy adapters) are all hard-coded with the expectation you are going to use a 3.5" floppy drive and nothing else, because why would you? I seriously have no goddamn idea how we went so long and the best anyone has ever developed to solve this problem is a read-only device. It's absolutely infuriating. Instead we ended up with a pile of USB floppy controllers that can read and write at the flux-level (the raw magnetic flux transitions on the disk rather than assume any one filesystem) that each have their own way of creating and reading disk images, doesn't "just work" in Windows like you would expect and cost a ton of money because they go way beyond just reading and writing a floppy disk in Windows like you've been able to since Windows itself was created.

[smokes cigarette to calm down]

So your "practical" option on a modern computer is one of these flux-level adapters that either require linux or rely entirely on the command line to operate. The "sensible" option is a completely separate computer old enough to have areal onboard floppy controller and a network adapter.

Last edited by MIPS; 02-07-2023 at 04:33 PM.
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