Making a Floppy Disk emulator with an Arduino Nano #VintageComputing #Arduino
It’s fun to gibe an SD card to someone and ask them to put it into a vintage IBM PC. No, the floppy drive is not the right slot. But that’s the right sentiment – how to make the floppy interface accept files via emulation.
Acemi Elektronikci made an Arduino Nano based floppy emulator which plugs into the floppy port of a PC old enough to have one, and allows the easy use of virtual floppy disks.
Aside from the Nano it has an SD card and associated level shifter, and an SSD1306 I2C screen. Most of the Arduino’s lines drive the floppy interface, so the five-button control comes to a single ADC pin via a resistor ladder. He freely admits that it’s not a perfect cycle-exact emulator of original hardware and there may be machines or even operating systems that complain when faced with it, but for all that it is a useful tool.
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