Here’s how to access a vintage 3.5- or 5.25-inch floppy disk on a modern Windows PC or Mac. Eventually, they were replaced, and floppy disk drives vanished from new computers.
Simulant’s OpenFlops costs £19.99 and for every board sold, 50p will be donated to The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, United Kingdom.Remember floppies? Back in the day, they were essential. Has additional 3.3V, 5V and GND power pins.This is supported already by the OpenFlops drive, with FlashFloppy firmware to add the feature in the upcoming firmware release. Emulates two drives at the same time (Green LED shows 1st drive disk activity & Red LED shows 2nd drive!).The USB connector can either be soldered on the board or connected to a pin header.Easily accessible through holes to add an external speaker and large solder pads to even mount one directly on to the PCB for floppy drive sounds.Easily accessible pin headers for connection of a i2c display (either OLED or LCD), rotary encoder (including power).Supports AutoSwap for games with a large number of disks.Directly supports a wide range of image formats.Can be installed on many different platforms.It is designed to run the FlashFloppy firmware, which gives it several improvements over the original Gotek:
OpenFlops is an Open Hardware implementation of a floppy disk emulator, inspired by the ubiquitous Gotek hardware. Their offer presents a board that can be installed in any shell made for the original Gotek (which Simulant also has an offer her e). Their OpenFlops comes with FlashFloppy firmware pre-installed. The first vendor to make a pre-assembled version of OpenFlops is Simulant. Besides many improvements over the original, OpenFlops is available under a free licence and therefore can be built by everybody. Suitable for most retro computers that use either internal or external floppy disk drives as a direct replacement or additional drive so you can load games/software from a USB flash drive or save data to your memory stick. OpenFlops is a hardware-based floppy emulator, similar to the Gotek drives.
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