This uses the same DOS functionality that powers the logical B: drive in a single-floppy system. It's been a while since I've looked at the DOS innards, but either it just notices the two drives have the same physical drive number, or there's a flag set in the Disk Parameter Block, and you get the whole "Insert disk for drive X:" thing. It also remembers which one is currently in use.
yep! There was some random neuron that fired off remembering that message, and that single floppy setups would use it. It made it ALMOST like you had 2 drives, but some software was hell on switching between disks.
Did this all the time in the 90s when you needed dual 5.25" for some software but wanted to use a 3.5" for new stuff. MFM hard disk controllers were still common. You can plug your toggle switch directly place of the floppy drive jumper switches and skip the breakout board entirely. Just crimp more plugs on your cable.
Add a button. Disk detect is just another pin on the interface. Exposing it on the same header would let you rig a momentary switch to for a disk detect anytime you want the refresh.
For the switch you could always just make a second PCB, attached to the first one but can be snapped off or just a separate board entirely, that has hole for the switch to be soldered in and a pin header to connect the wires. That is assuming the time consuming part of making them is attaching each individual wire by hand. Edit: the header would have to stick out one side and the switch stick out the other side. And maybe some key or colour code for the wires/connector so no one plugs things in wrong.
I was thinking something like that, but perhaps soldering the switch onto an edge, vs through hole. then the pin header would extend backwards and it would be in a nice line for mounting
6:15 if you are still looking for ways to mount that board or other things to your test bench look into T-slot nuts which are a common/standard way to mount things to those aluminium extrusions
Greaseweazle can support 3 drives at once with a flat cable. You have to jumper a unique drive select for each drive. In the software, you would then indicate drives 0,1,2 instead of A,B.
!!! Hard to read, hard to follow (no links), hard to search for ... so please thank RUclips for Censoring !!! For more info, see : glencanyon, 10 mo. ago (topic "I installed 3 floppy drives and a greaseweazle into this old SCSI enclosure. It has a 1.44MB 3.5" drive, a 360K 5.25" drive and a 1.2MB 5.25" drive."): "I used a cable with no twist. You have two options with the greaseweazle. You can use a standard floppy cable with the twist that supports 2 drives. The two floppy drives would need to be jumpered as DS1 - like in a standard PC configuration. From the command line using the tools, you would then indicate you are using drive A (beyond the twist) or B - the drive before the twist. When you use a straight cable with no twist, you can connect up to 3 devices on that single cable. You then have to jumper your floppy drives to be either DS0, DS1, or DS2. From the command line, you would indicate the drive as 0, 1, or 2. I made this cable by cutting off the twist from the cable (I just used scissors) and then added another edge connector to give me 3 connections." Or the Greaseweazle wiki site, "Greaseweazle Models": Features - Multiple Drives, supported by Model: F1 Plus, F7 Lightning Plus and V4. Previous Models not included (Nov. 2022) (Multiple Drives: Allows simultaneous connection to two PC, or three Shugart, drives on a single ribbon cable. Useful for cased installations.) see also: John Elliott, "More Than Two Floppy Drives"; Greaseweazle Wiki, "Drive Select"; and as a little overview for jumper-piano-players: search for the 5.25-jumpers on "Jope's drive modification page"
I think it was more so that single drive computers could have a virtual second drive, that allowed access that appeared to be 2 drives, while only on one. I recall a faint memory of using a computer that required lots of floppy switching and seeing that message popup a lot, on some programs. And you'd be swapping between a program disk/data disk a lot
Image copying a file from one floppy to an other, with only a single physical drive. Neat to see it can be used with different hardware / disk geometries.
if you used a DPTT switch you could have things as follows: position 1. drive 1 position 2. emit disk change signal position 3. drive 2 this way, you could spare yourself this whole disk driver stuff and dos would be told everything by hardware
It’s been a while but there is a dedicated pin for this, I believe it indicates 1 when a disk has changed, then drops to 0 when any other command is received. You’d still need to initiate some disk operation for it to notice the new disk, I think. I don’t think this tripped an interrupt, I think it expected the system to check this pin at appropriate times, but I could be wrong about this.
Might have to pick one of these up, I have a build that involves recovering mountains of lost Gerber files off a ton of 5.14" floppies from Maplin Electronics here in the UK
that driver.sys methot is REALLY cool! my only concern would be other operating systems like freedos, 95, 98, XP, OS/2, etc. how about adding a header for a button that manually sends the disk change signal or even some fancy circuit that automatically does it when toggling the switch
How about making it the same form factor as a 3,5" drive? Lots of machines have plenty of empty 3,5" hard disk slots, so you can put it in there and maybe even accomodate even more drive cables if you want. Also, you would have enough space for things like relays or digital multiplexers which would allow you to select drives through some command from the host system.
@@JohnSmith-iu8cj Simple serial I/O? Or maybe even an ISA I/O port connected to a relay driver, through an AND gate and a latch, if you want to keep it super low cost.
On my family's Commodore PC-10 (XT clone), it had a 720k floppy as B-drive. In DOS 3.3 you could reassign the B drive from 360k to 720k with DRIVER.SYS (no fancy BIOS upgrades, mind you!). But in DOS 4.01 it gave the 720k drive the letter C instead and you had to press the Any key to continue. In DOS 5 and later, it behaved the same as in 3.3. If memory serves: DRIVER.SYS was first shipped with MS-DOS 3.2.
I think this is the kind of thing I need. I have a Gotek and a 5.25" floppy drive.....I want to use them both on a retro TRS-80 model 3. I'm not sure if I have the cables to handle this thing but it looks like I could make it work.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind picking up a bare board or 2. It's a simple and elegant alternative to Sergei Kiselev's Monster FDC (which is hilarious overkill, supports a total of EIGHT floppy drives, five more than most any retro enthusiast would ever need). As an aside, I wonder if something is going on internally like this in those Epson 5.25/3.5 combo floppy drives.
The test bench is my favourite of ur pc builds too. Very practical. I think I would mount ur interface board in 5.25 bay fan controller hub, add it to ur drive stack, and replace the dials with buttons to select the drives
I made a ZX Spectrum clone years ago and had 3 floppy drives connected to it. The thing is that TR-DOS known as Betadisk does support 2 drives only. While I needed 2 x 5.25" drives connected AND 3.5". Another thing to notice is that I used an old desktop case from some 286 PC which had a Turbo button on it. And guess what? I just used that Turbo button to switch one of "disk select" wires between 2 drives (3.5" and 5.25") so in one position I had two 5.25 drives available and in another position I had 3.5" and 5.25" drives. Easy!
Correction. TR-DOS did actually support 4 drives. But another problem occurred: some programs always thought they were started from "A" drive and that's why I had to switch drives actually. Whenever I needed to start a program from "a" drive I had to select 5.25 or 3.5 drive with that button depending on actual diskette.
This has got me thinking: I have a BBC Master and want to use 3 drives - a 5.25, 3.5 and a Gotek and I would like to have the 3.5 or the Gotek as drive 0 and the 5.25 as drive 1 and be able to swap drive 0 and drive 1 (so I can boot from either the 3.5/Gotek or the 5.25). Food for thought indeed. I definitely would buy one of these boards for my Greaseweazle setup, too.
Driver.sys is documented in the help program in later DOS' and is also described in the full DOS manual from Microsoft. Getting info on it isn't that hard.
As far as I remember most of the floppy-drives I have ever used facilitated mounting points under the drive. Maybe it would be a solution to build a mounting bracket to screw the board underneth the bottom-most drive in the system if there is room for it. This way the cables could be rather short. Just an idea that occured!
Find one of those old huge KVM switches with the physical A/B/C/D knob in a big beige box. Those switch several signals at once. If you don't want to modify the switch and you're sufficiently insane, you could make floppy-to-VGA adapters just to plug into the switch. There are also quite cheap ICs you can get on breakout boards that do the same job. Four input signals route one pin to one of 16 other pins, bidirectionally. You would need one per signal you want to switch though.
or you could buy a 'rotary switch' bare! the rotary switches i've been able to find easily have 12 contacts and you can get them wired up in pairs, groups of 3, groups of 4, etc. i've experimented with using the three-pole ones for audio, it's effectively what a lot of old audio switchboxes do as well. a 2 pole rotary switch would let you choose from... six floppy drives!!
Can you go into more detail about backing up TRS80 disks? I have a greaseweazle and have had a heck of a time trying to make good backups that I can then write back to a floppy.
I have been working on a device that sits on a floppy cable between a drive and the computer. It has three modes of operation. One, it can disable the drive and emulate it. Two, flux image a disk from the drive or three, become invisible and let you use the drive as usual. It is controlled by wi-fi and an app running on a phone.
Very interesting indeed, especially with the driver.sys info. Never knew what that was for. Definitely easier than trying to find a floppy controller that can handle drives 3 and 4. But that makes me wonder. With all the other modern recreations we have in the retro community, has someone made a new floppy controller board that would support 4 drives, or at least 2 with selectable addressing?
If you see his "4 floppies controller" vid, i think he points out to XT FDE or something like that, that seems to be a homebrew project for a floppy controller that supports 4 disks with different IDS
@@eduardoavila646 I think I watched that, but I’ll have to double check. I also found an open source design for a FDC, that can handle up to 8 floppy drives, which is insane.
How complex is it to replicate that refresh signal which the real floppy drive sends when you take a disk out? I ask because I'm curious if it'd be possible to integrate a circuit into the switcher board that sends that signal whenever you throw the toggle switch. That would be really cool!!
you could add headers for whether the incoming cable has a twist, and for whether either of the outgoing cables has a twist (one header each). instead of using icons, i would write "has twist" and "has no twist"
Part of this DOS functionality was there from the start. In a system with just one floppy drive, DOS would assign both A and B to that drive. It probably couldn't be configured manually until PC-DOS 3.2, as that's the first version with driver.sys
This is just simply brilliant, with emphasis on "simply"... ❤I'm in love❤... and boy-oh-boy do I feel your pain with soldering up those toggle-switches. - There came a point where I just began soldering pin-headers directly onto the toggle-switches and then used Dupont-patch cables. But an even better solution is to use these smaller PCB-mountable switches which is available in exactly the same variation of pins and with exactly the same functionality. Then of course solder those onto small PCBs with through-holes for pin-headers... and, you guessed it, use Dupont-patch cables in-between. - But I guess if you also (just like me) love to hate these old Airwolf-style toggle-switches. Then I guess similar PCBs only with holes large enough for the "pins" of those Airwolf-switches wouldn't be entirely impossible to create 🤔 BTW. That unobtainable crimp tool you mentioned... is kind of rather easily available on AliExpress. I think I paid around $20 for mine. - Search for "G-214 Cable Clamp IDC Crimp Tool" For the Toggle Switches - Search for "SPDT DPDT Latching Toggle Switch MTS-102" I got mine from a store called "EternalFar" (on AliExpress) - okay quality, not military grade... but what do you expect, right?
many years ago I saw a PC with something like this and used a key switch instead of a toggle switch. I think the DRIVER.SYS was mostly used for tape backups that used the floppy controller like the Colorado DJ25 jumbo 700. Or a SCSI floppy drive possibly? Would the SETVER command work to trick the DRIVER.SYS driver to work with say DOS7.1?
17:04: Aren't there also compatibility issues between 3½" double density and 3½" high density drives, because of their different respective coercivity?
QUESTION...So if you want to add two of these to your system, one to swap between a Gotek and a 3.5 floppy drive, and the other to swap between 360k and 1.2M 5.25" floppy drives, how do you write the config.sys script? Do you have two seperate 'Device=C: \DOS\driver.sys...' lines, or can it be done in one line?
I'm wondering whether this plus some kind of driver would work with one of those floppy interface cassette tape drives? I guess you could connect the tape drive on the first connector and the adapter board on the second one, then load the tape drive driver plus the MS-DOS driver too. maybe that would work? Honestly I've never managed to get a floppy interface tape drive working. I got one in a machine I bought of eBay ages ago, but the HDD was dead so I never got it working. I assume it requires a specific driver though.
Floppy cables are cable of daisy chaining up to 2 drives (with a twist on some of the ribbon lines or set the drive ID). Some drive controllers have to connections to allow more than 2 floppy drives to be connected by connecting more than one cable. Wouldn't this be easier?
I've been searching a 'breakout' floppy solution, and I'm wondering if that unpopulated header is a passthrough header. I'm building a win98 retro rocket and the floppy header on the board is on the complete opposite corner of the case as the floppies. Even the longest cables don't have the right spacing... I know I could make a custom cable (which I might do eventually), but the costs associated with making a single cable are higher than I'd like. Would I be able to use this as a dedicated breakout for two floppies?
We used that driver.sys trick to pretend there was a 2nd floppy drive in a single drive system. You could then point your software at the B: drive and the OS would prompt you to switch floppies. It was only useful in a handful of scenarios (read: crappy business software).
How about attaching an ESP32 board to it and using the GPIOs to control de select logic. You can control it from a push button or have it serve a basic website.
i tried to do something similar with just a switch and IDE hard drives. the thought was switching the jumpers to allow the system to boot the first drive so this would allow swapping. it sort of worked and then i never revisited it. switching between master and slave not that that exists, but then again neither one is primary or secondary either....... so...... ?
just checked my MS-DOS 3.31 86-BOX VM and it indeed includes driver.sys 1165 bytes dated 6-01-89 can't test it as it's a VM but verified that MS-DOS at least as far back as 3.31 includes driver.sys
I wonder how hard it would be to create an ISA device and corresponding driver that can detect when you attempt to access the other drive and automatically switch the controller eliminating the need for a switch.
i think this prompt is not meant for multiple drives, it's meant for collections of disks, so you don't have to cache them over and over. That's why it says "load diskette" and not "switch drive selector switch".
No such thing as a PC that only supports one floppy. Do you mean your cable only has one connection? Use a different cable. The PC floppy interface supports multiple floppies. Your floppy drive will have jumper switches to set drive select if your cable doesn't have a twist.
I have an IBM motherboard that only allows you to configure one floppy drive. The BIOS will only ever report one drive to the OS as a result effectively meaning the board can only support one drive. This could be used to work around that but that board is probably later for running Win98 or XP which isn't going to be as smooth of an experience as it is with MS-DOS
my current nightmare is getting the SCSCI drive I have to work with a dell pentium 1 using an interface card, only reason I accepted this machine was cause it had SCSI interface and IDE interface
also this reminds me of having to soft reset the kaypro I have as CPM doesn't do hot swapping very well and the cache doesnt always clear so sometimes you have to I think its crtl C on the kaypros to soft reset the unit, forgetting to do this can result in disk read errors in cpm 2.2
This is nice but could be so much better and don't need driver.sys and there are two ways to achieve this: 1. add a push button which issues a disk changed pulse 2. add some more logic to automatically issues a disk changed pulse when the selection switch is switched
Hey, if you’re running the audio through a mid-cut filter, could you ease up on the depth a bit? Smiley face EQs are great for music, but that’s where all the intelligibility is for speech.
this is very basic. it is mind-boggling that they dont integrate this switching feature in the first place. like seriously what were they thinking. old people developes so many interfaces thinking that theirs is the best while literally all of those interfaces are poo (thats why we dont use it anymore nowadays lmao thanks for usb).
A heads up to help you: Having it shown in linux could help spread your idea. Also though AtariST (since it uses PC formatted floppies). As an aside, an (A500) Amiga mod would be cool. A PC (or Amiga) version via ieee1284 or parallel ports would be cool but switching partly via serial (mostly PC though, especially parallel bootable, EPP and ECP). See also Lallafa Parallel Plipbox (Amiga). My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.
@Mr Guru I know about that configuration and yet I was speaking of a different variety of scenarios. For example, perhaps you have heard of how the external floppy drive port can be converted to become the boot device by means of gentle alterations to the motherboard. Thereby fd1 is fd0. Then so as to save 30KB in memory (per floppy drive), a switch between floppy drives like that device is a potential method to try (similar in some ways to the video). Be mindful that having 4 floppy drives simultaneously instead of 1 means that an extra 90KB RAM is use, and yet some amiga models have only 256KB or 512KB RAM. Additionally, some software refuses to recognise drives beyond the fd0 drive. This information is to help you, kindly.
@Mr Guru The original Amiga A1000 has 256KB RAM and some Amigas like an A500 have 512KB. That is an example of a nice bit of information to expand your knowledge and brighten your day. Also, other people can enjoy the information above. My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.
nah, buy an Amiga haha the Amiga can handle 4 drives the same time from birth on ;-) What we would really need today is a floppy controller for mainboards coming without a controller onboard... as a PCIe card (or PCI card, most boards still have PCI)
Love the board, nice tidy solution. You can also press CTRL+C at the DOS prompt to clear the directory cache in MS DOS.
This uses the same DOS functionality that powers the logical B: drive in a single-floppy system. It's been a while since I've looked at the DOS innards, but either it just notices the two drives have the same physical drive number, or there's a flag set in the Disk Parameter Block, and you get the whole "Insert disk for drive X:" thing. It also remembers which one is currently in use.
yep! There was some random neuron that fired off remembering that message, and that single floppy setups would use it. It made it ALMOST like you had 2 drives, but some software was hell on switching between disks.
Did this all the time in the 90s when you needed dual 5.25" for some software but wanted to use a 3.5" for new stuff. MFM hard disk controllers were still common. You can plug your toggle switch directly place of the floppy drive jumper switches and skip the breakout board entirely. Just crimp more plugs on your cable.
Add a button. Disk detect is just another pin on the interface. Exposing it on the same header would let you rig a momentary switch to for a disk detect anytime you want the refresh.
Should be pin 34.
For the switch you could always just make a second PCB, attached to the first one but can be snapped off or just a separate board entirely, that has hole for the switch to be soldered in and a pin header to connect the wires. That is assuming the time consuming part of making them is attaching each individual wire by hand.
Edit: the header would have to stick out one side and the switch stick out the other side. And maybe some key or colour code for the wires/connector so no one plugs things in wrong.
I was thinking something like that, but perhaps soldering the switch onto an edge, vs through hole. then the pin header would extend backwards and it would be in a nice line for mounting
6:15 if you are still looking for ways to mount that board or other things to your test bench look into T-slot nuts which are a common/standard way to mount things to those aluminium extrusions
At 11:44 should it read "DEVICE.SYS" or "DRIVER.SYS" on the silkscreen rear? If so there's a typo
You can also force DOS to re-cache the selected drive by using CTL-C before your next DIR command. Just my 2 cents.........
Just want to say i ordered one from PCBway, soldered it, and it works great! Thank you for your fantastic work!
Greaseweazle can support 3 drives at once with a flat cable. You have to jumper a unique drive select for each drive. In the software, you would then indicate drives 0,1,2 instead of A,B.
!!! Hard to read, hard to follow (no links), hard to search for ... so please thank RUclips for Censoring !!!
For more info, see : glencanyon, 10 mo. ago (topic "I installed 3 floppy drives and a greaseweazle into this old SCSI enclosure. It has a 1.44MB 3.5" drive, a 360K 5.25" drive and a 1.2MB 5.25" drive."): "I used a cable with no twist.
You have two options with the greaseweazle. You can use a standard floppy cable with the twist that supports 2 drives. The two floppy drives would need to be jumpered as DS1 - like in a standard PC configuration. From the command line using the tools, you would then indicate you are using drive A (beyond the twist) or B - the drive before the twist.
When you use a straight cable with no twist, you can connect up to 3 devices on that single cable. You then have to jumper your floppy drives to be either DS0, DS1, or DS2. From the command line, you would indicate the drive as 0, 1, or 2. I made this cable by cutting off the twist from the cable (I just used scissors) and then added another edge connector to give me 3 connections."
Or the Greaseweazle wiki site, "Greaseweazle Models":
Features - Multiple Drives, supported by Model: F1 Plus, F7 Lightning Plus and V4. Previous Models not included (Nov. 2022)
(Multiple Drives: Allows simultaneous connection to two PC, or three Shugart, drives on a single ribbon cable. Useful for cased installations.)
see also: John Elliott, "More Than Two Floppy Drives"; Greaseweazle Wiki, "Drive Select"; and as a little overview for jumper-piano-players: search for the 5.25-jumpers on "Jope's drive modification page"
I suspect that DRIVER.SYS was originally added to support the dual floppies on the IBM PC Convertible
The 5150 also had an external floppy port, but I don't even know if there were actual drives or drive cases built for it.
I think it was more so that single drive computers could have a virtual second drive, that allowed access that appeared to be 2 drives, while only on one. I recall a faint memory of using a computer that required lots of floppy switching and seeing that message popup a lot, on some programs. And you'd be swapping between a program disk/data disk a lot
Image copying a file from one floppy to an other, with only a single physical drive.
Neat to see it can be used with different hardware / disk geometries.
if you used a DPTT switch you could have things as follows:
position 1. drive 1
position 2. emit disk change signal
position 3. drive 2
this way, you could spare yourself this whole disk driver stuff and dos would be told everything by hardware
@Mr Guru so how does dos know the disk changed and it needs to invalidate the cache being talked about in the video?
It’s been a while but there is a dedicated pin for this, I believe it indicates 1 when a disk has changed, then drops to 0 when any other command is received.
You’d still need to initiate some disk operation for it to notice the new disk, I think. I don’t think this tripped an interrupt, I think it expected the system to check this pin at appropriate times, but I could be wrong about this.
Great project, I'll definitely gonna build one of these, thanks
I love the elegant simplicity of your design.
Epic, classic listing at the end.
Might have to pick one of these up, I have a build that involves recovering mountains of lost Gerber files off a ton of 5.14" floppies from Maplin Electronics here in the UK
that driver.sys methot is REALLY cool! my only concern would be other operating systems like freedos, 95, 98, XP, OS/2, etc. how about adding a header for a button that manually sends the disk change signal or even some fancy circuit that automatically does it when toggling the switch
"Absolutely!" Awesome!
and more awesome to come!
How about making it the same form factor as a 3,5" drive? Lots of machines have plenty of empty 3,5" hard disk slots, so you can put it in there and maybe even accomodate even more drive cables if you want.
Also, you would have enough space for things like relays or digital multiplexers which would allow you to select drives through some command from the host system.
And how would you control a relay from dos? 😂
@@JohnSmith-iu8cj Simple serial I/O? Or maybe even an ISA I/O port connected to a relay driver, through an AND gate and a latch, if you want to keep it super low cost.
On my family's Commodore PC-10 (XT clone), it had a 720k floppy as B-drive. In DOS 3.3 you could reassign the B drive from 360k to 720k with DRIVER.SYS (no fancy BIOS upgrades, mind you!). But in DOS 4.01 it gave the 720k drive the letter C instead and you had to press the Any key to continue. In DOS 5 and later, it behaved the same as in 3.3. If memory serves: DRIVER.SYS was first shipped with MS-DOS 3.2.
I think this is the kind of thing I need. I have a Gotek and a 5.25" floppy drive.....I want to use them both on a retro TRS-80 model 3. I'm not sure if I have the cables to handle this thing but it looks like I could make it work.
i honestly like when tech tagents does really good vids
Honestly, I wouldn't mind picking up a bare board or 2. It's a simple and elegant alternative to Sergei Kiselev's Monster FDC (which is hilarious overkill, supports a total of EIGHT floppy drives, five more than most any retro enthusiast would ever need). As an aside, I wonder if something is going on internally like this in those Epson 5.25/3.5 combo floppy drives.
The test bench is my favourite of ur pc builds too. Very practical.
I think I would mount ur interface board in 5.25 bay fan controller hub, add it to ur drive stack, and replace the dials with buttons to select the drives
I made a ZX Spectrum clone years ago and had 3 floppy drives connected to it. The thing is that TR-DOS known as Betadisk does support 2 drives only. While I needed 2 x 5.25" drives connected AND 3.5". Another thing to notice is that I used an old desktop case from some 286 PC which had a Turbo button on it. And guess what? I just used that Turbo button to switch one of "disk select" wires between 2 drives (3.5" and 5.25") so in one position I had two 5.25 drives available and in another position I had 3.5" and 5.25" drives. Easy!
Correction. TR-DOS did actually support 4 drives. But another problem occurred: some programs always thought they were started from "A" drive and that's why I had to switch drives actually. Whenever I needed to start a program from "a" drive I had to select 5.25 or 3.5 drive with that button depending on actual diskette.
This has got me thinking:
I have a BBC Master and want to use 3 drives - a 5.25, 3.5 and a Gotek and I would like to have the 3.5 or the Gotek as drive 0 and the 5.25 as drive 1 and be able to swap drive 0 and drive 1 (so I can boot from either the 3.5/Gotek or the 5.25). Food for thought indeed. I definitely would buy one of these boards for my Greaseweazle setup, too.
Driver.sys is documented in the help program in later DOS' and is also described in the full DOS manual from Microsoft. Getting info on it isn't that hard.
I have been looking for this to switch between a real foppy drive and a gotek, cant beleive something like this didnt already exist
I did that back in the late 80's to switch from floppy to tape drive
Excellent video. Where did you source the metal strips that hold the drives together? Tia.
As far as I remember most of the floppy-drives I have ever used facilitated mounting points under the drive. Maybe it would be a solution to build a mounting bracket to screw the board underneth the bottom-most drive in the system if there is room for it. This way the cables could be rather short.
Just an idea that occured!
Find one of those old huge KVM switches with the physical A/B/C/D knob in a big beige box. Those switch several signals at once. If you don't want to modify the switch and you're sufficiently insane, you could make floppy-to-VGA adapters just to plug into the switch.
There are also quite cheap ICs you can get on breakout boards that do the same job. Four input signals route one pin to one of 16 other pins, bidirectionally. You would need one per signal you want to switch though.
or you could buy a 'rotary switch' bare! the rotary switches i've been able to find easily have 12 contacts and you can get them wired up in pairs, groups of 3, groups of 4, etc. i've experimented with using the three-pole ones for audio, it's effectively what a lot of old audio switchboxes do as well. a 2 pole rotary switch would let you choose from... six floppy drives!!
Can you go into more detail about backing up TRS80 disks? I have a greaseweazle and have had a heck of a time trying to make good backups that I can then write back to a floppy.
I have been working on a device that sits on a floppy cable between a drive and the computer. It has three modes of operation. One, it can disable the drive and emulate it. Two, flux image a disk from the drive or three, become invisible and let you use the drive as usual. It is controlled by wi-fi and an app running on a phone.
Very interesting indeed, especially with the driver.sys info. Never knew what that was for. Definitely easier than trying to find a floppy controller that can handle drives 3 and 4. But that makes me wonder. With all the other modern recreations we have in the retro community, has someone made a new floppy controller board that would support 4 drives, or at least 2 with selectable addressing?
If you see his "4 floppies controller" vid, i think he points out to XT FDE or something like that, that seems to be a homebrew project for a floppy controller that supports 4 disks with different IDS
@@eduardoavila646 I think I watched that, but I’ll have to double check. I also found an open source design for a FDC, that can handle up to 8 floppy drives, which is insane.
@@soberjedi42 Woow, really cool actually
If would be great to reproduce a driver.sys that instead of prompting you to swap drives, it energized a relay that would throw your switch.
How complex is it to replicate that refresh signal which the real floppy drive sends when you take a disk out? I ask because I'm curious if it'd be possible to integrate a circuit into the switcher board that sends that signal whenever you throw the toggle switch. That would be really cool!!
you could add headers for whether the incoming cable has a twist, and for whether either of the outgoing cables has a twist (one header each). instead of using icons, i would write "has twist" and "has no twist"
Using a mux like CD4052 (74HCT4052), can switch between 4 drivers using two switch (or a two bit encoder switch).
Part of this DOS functionality was there from the start. In a system with just one floppy drive, DOS would assign both A and B to that drive. It probably couldn't be configured manually until PC-DOS 3.2, as that's the first version with driver.sys
if you created a 3D printable case, and uploaded that and the board gerbers to say PCBWay as a project, that would cover most options
a breakoff pcb for the switch can make the cable job easier (you can buy cables for pin headerspremade)
This is just simply brilliant, with emphasis on "simply"... ❤I'm in love❤... and boy-oh-boy do I feel your pain with soldering up those toggle-switches.
- There came a point where I just began soldering pin-headers directly onto the toggle-switches and then used Dupont-patch cables. But an even better solution is to use these smaller PCB-mountable switches which is available in exactly the same variation of pins and with exactly the same functionality. Then of course solder those onto small PCBs with through-holes for pin-headers... and, you guessed it, use Dupont-patch cables in-between.
- But I guess if you also (just like me) love to hate these old Airwolf-style toggle-switches. Then I guess similar PCBs only with holes large enough for the "pins" of those Airwolf-switches wouldn't be entirely impossible to create 🤔
BTW. That unobtainable crimp tool you mentioned... is kind of rather easily available on AliExpress. I think I paid around $20 for mine.
- Search for "G-214 Cable Clamp IDC Crimp Tool"
For the Toggle Switches
- Search for "SPDT DPDT Latching Toggle Switch MTS-102"
I got mine from a store called "EternalFar" (on AliExpress) - okay quality, not military grade... but what do you expect, right?
The cable solution is easy. Design it to use a PCB mounted switch. The PCB could be mounted to a bracket with a switch
many years ago I saw a PC with something like this and used a key switch instead of a toggle switch.
I think the DRIVER.SYS was mostly used for tape backups that used the floppy controller like the Colorado DJ25 jumbo 700. Or a SCSI floppy drive possibly?
Would the SETVER command work to trick the DRIVER.SYS driver to work with say DOS7.1?
Do you have any videos comparing the kryoflux and greaseweasel?
17:04: Aren't there also compatibility issues between 3½" double density and 3½" high density drives, because of their different respective coercivity?
Just use a couple of those DPDT switches and 3d print a lever that switches both at the same time.
QUESTION...So if you want to add two of these to your system, one to swap between a Gotek and a 3.5 floppy drive, and the other to swap between 360k and 1.2M 5.25" floppy drives, how do you write the config.sys script? Do you have two seperate 'Device=C: \DOS\driver.sys...' lines, or can it be done in one line?
I'm wondering whether this plus some kind of driver would work with one of those floppy interface cassette tape drives? I guess you could connect the tape drive on the first connector and the adapter board on the second one, then load the tape drive driver plus the MS-DOS driver too. maybe that would work?
Honestly I've never managed to get a floppy interface tape drive working. I got one in a machine I bought of eBay ages ago, but the HDD was dead so I never got it working. I assume it requires a specific driver though.
This is quite an interesting project. My only concern is does the settings in the config.Sys file overrides the settings set in BIOS?
Hey, where can I get one of them expansion card stands you use at 0:10?
Hi, I was looking for this since ages, and now I found your video! Where can I buy this adapter? Thanks
Floppy cables are cable of daisy chaining up to 2 drives (with a twist on some of the ribbon lines or set the drive ID). Some drive controllers have to connections to allow more than 2 floppy drives to be connected by connecting more than one cable. Wouldn't this be easier?
Im toying with making an A/B/C floppy drive switch using a stereo source selector rotating switch.
When it comes to mounting that board, could it just plug into the back of a drive?
I've been searching a 'breakout' floppy solution, and I'm wondering if that unpopulated header is a passthrough header.
I'm building a win98 retro rocket and the floppy header on the board is on the complete opposite corner of the case as the floppies. Even the longest cables don't have the right spacing... I know I could make a custom cable (which I might do eventually), but the costs associated with making a single cable are higher than I'd like.
Would I be able to use this as a dedicated breakout for two floppies?
I probably should have watched longer... I think it will.
20:10 ahh, yess, I love Pappardelle
We used that driver.sys trick to pretend there was a 2nd floppy drive in a single drive system. You could then point your software at the B: drive and the OS would prompt you to switch floppies. It was only useful in a handful of scenarios (read: crappy business software).
i wonder if you could have some kinda logic chip on there that would switch the pins without need a 6-wire switch.
How about attaching an ESP32 board to it and using the GPIOs to control de select logic. You can control it from a push button or have it serve a basic website.
So you need a double throw double pole switch, which should be wired to socket headers? That's just a Turbo button.
i tried to do something similar with just a switch and IDE hard drives. the thought was switching the jumpers to allow the system to boot the first drive so this would allow swapping. it sort of worked and then i never revisited it. switching between master and slave not that that exists, but then again neither one is primary or secondary either....... so...... ?
Would a guitars five way switch work?
(5 minutes into 30 minute video) "we're not gonna draw out this video! that's it!" lol
Device.sys or Driver.sys? The white PCB text says Device.sys or am I missing something?
16:07: "I can't get the DRIVER.SYS from 6.22 to run on the 7.1 from Windows 98."
I want something like this for my Amiga A1200
just checked my MS-DOS 3.31 86-BOX VM and it indeed includes driver.sys 1165 bytes dated 6-01-89 can't test it as it's a VM but verified that MS-DOS at least as far back as 3.31 includes driver.sys
I wonder how hard it would be to create an ISA device and corresponding driver that can detect when you attempt to access the other drive and automatically switch the controller eliminating the need for a switch.
i think this prompt is not meant for multiple drives, it's meant for collections of disks, so you don't have to cache them over and over. That's why it says "load diskette" and not "switch drive selector switch".
I'm interested in this because of PCs that only support a single floppy drive but I have no idea where I would put the switch.
No such thing as a PC that only supports one floppy. Do you mean your cable only has one connection? Use a different cable. The PC floppy interface supports multiple floppies. Your floppy drive will have jumper switches to set drive select if your cable doesn't have a twist.
I have an IBM motherboard that only allows you to configure one floppy drive. The BIOS will only ever report one drive to the OS as a result effectively meaning the board can only support one drive. This could be used to work around that but that board is probably later for running Win98 or XP which isn't going to be as smooth of an experience as it is with MS-DOS
Yep, later 98 machine, only allows you to configure one drive in the BIOS.
whats this board - how much is it? where can i buy one from?? thanks
What about a BCD Switch to set the Drive Number.
my current nightmare is getting the SCSCI drive I have to work with a dell pentium 1 using an interface card, only reason I accepted this machine was cause it had SCSI interface and IDE interface
also this reminds me of having to soft reset the kaypro I have as CPM doesn't do hot swapping very well and the cache doesnt always clear so sometimes you have to I think its crtl C on the kaypros to soft reset the unit, forgetting to do this can result in disk read errors in cpm 2.2
@Mr Guru could just be my syquest drive has died of old age too
are you selling these yet?
Id totally buy one if you were to sell them
Need this for my televideo tcp 1 cp/m computer.
This is nice but could be so much better and don't need driver.sys and there are two ways to achieve this:
1. add a push button which issues a disk changed pulse
2. add some more logic to automatically issues a disk changed pulse when the selection switch is switched
This hack was made in the german computer magazine c't.
Wow trackball keyboard
Now add a software layer that auto switches in software so we can get some really shitty floppy drive RAID going on.
develop a floppy drive controller to work on modern mother boards..
Link to the original floppy video ruclips.net/video/ewmHZ-MC0ck/видео.html
Hey, if you’re running the audio through a mid-cut filter, could you ease up on the depth a bit? Smiley face EQs are great for music, but that’s where all the intelligibility is for speech.
this is very basic. it is mind-boggling that they dont integrate this switching feature in the first place. like seriously what were they thinking. old people developes so many interfaces thinking that theirs is the best while literally all of those interfaces are poo (thats why we dont use it anymore nowadays lmao thanks for usb).
Floppies!
What’s up? I’m early for once
No buffering or debouncing? That's an accident waiting to happen.
A heads up to help you: Having it shown in linux could help spread your idea. Also though AtariST (since it uses PC formatted floppies). As an aside, an (A500) Amiga mod would be cool. A PC (or Amiga) version via ieee1284 or parallel ports would be cool but switching partly via serial (mostly PC though, especially parallel bootable, EPP and ECP). See also Lallafa Parallel Plipbox (Amiga).
My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.
@Mr Guru I know about that configuration and yet I was speaking of a different variety of scenarios. For example, perhaps you have heard of how the external floppy drive port can be converted to become the boot device by means of gentle alterations to the motherboard. Thereby fd1 is fd0. Then so as to save 30KB in memory (per floppy drive), a switch between floppy drives like that device is a potential method to try (similar in some ways to the video). Be mindful that having 4 floppy drives simultaneously instead of 1 means that an extra 90KB RAM is use, and yet some amiga models have only 256KB or 512KB RAM. Additionally, some software refuses to recognise drives beyond the fd0 drive. This information is to help you, kindly.
@Mr Guru The original Amiga A1000 has 256KB RAM and some Amigas like an A500 have 512KB. That is an example of a nice bit of information to expand your knowledge and brighten your day. Also, other people can enjoy the information above. My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.
when everytime I hear "I developed ...", I think: "reeeeeally?"
nah, buy an Amiga haha the Amiga can handle 4 drives the same time from birth on ;-)
What we would really need today is a floppy controller for mainboards coming without a controller onboard... as a PCIe card (or PCI card, most boards still have PCI)