Mike's PCjr Page

As we all know, with floppy drives and disk becoming more scarce, older PCs have been becoming more difficult for many of us to put to use. Especially those who our new to vintage computing attempting to restore a fossil.


These thoughts had me wondering if any of you have turned to floppy drive emulators to keep your system alive.
Such a solution eliminates the need to use floppy disks and reduces many inconveniences and brings our systems up to date to accept select storage mediums of modern times,
but comes with a few flaws... mainly cramped nostalgia. Mainly the joys of swapping diskettes and hearing the stepper motor do their magic every time we access the drive. Not only that, but if the drive is installed to the peanut's only drive, it would no longer be able to utilize the diskettes it was designed to use unless you create an image from another machine or if an external diskette drive is installed.

So... Have any of you used a floppy emulator on a junior? I haven't seen anything about it on this forum, nor on any other forum, not that I've looked very hard.

If I've ever come down to using one, I'd do it only if I had to replace my main drive do to total wear.

Floppies? That is what hard drives and networking are for ...

My machine boots directly from the jrIDE attached hard drive. And if I need anything else, I run either an FTP client or an FTP server right on the machine. No need for sneaker net in my house.

Even before the jrIDE I just needed one boot floppy. After that, I was using a parallel port attached hard drive and networking.



Mike

You're able to boot directly from C:\ with Jr-IDE?

Eric wrote:You're able to boot directly from C:\ with Jr-IDE?

Yup, that was one of the main design goals. Mike got boot support in the BIOS extension working really well.

Eric wrote:You're able to boot directly from C:\ with Jr-IDE?

Dude - there is no other way to fly ...

The original work was done with the XT-IDE card in a bus adapter. The current work is based on the jrIDE adapter. The BIOS that comes with that adapter adds fixed disk support so that the Jr can boot straight off of the hard disk, just like a XT or AT does.

A Jr with a hard drive changes the user experience ... the machine is much nicer without the floppy shuffle or a slow parallel port attached device.

Nice. I've read a bit about it on the thread, but I didn't read every page. I probably should. I need to know more about this.

Still an interesting question though. How would one connect a floppy emulator to the Jr? There are custom floppy emulators out there for specific vintage machines (I have one for my TI 99/4A), but I don't think I have come across one for the PC...

I have never used one, but I understand the model I have pictured can be set to different types of drives. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but I think I remember someone using one on an XT.




I also just remembered that I have a question about the Qumetrak 142 used in the junior. If I want to use this in a more modern system, am I supposed to use a twisted cable, or what? I've attempted to connect it to a and set the bios to detect 5.25 360K drives, but it wouldn't work.

Anyway, I'll see if I can find the thread about running a floppy emulator on the XT.