Floppy drive emulators

Floppy drive emulators

Floppy drive emulator is a device that acts in the same way as a normal floppy disk drive would act, but 100% perfection is not attained here as a USB stick is not exactly like a floppy disk. The floppy disk is an analog device that is used to store digital data. In case of analog recordings, the data size can rapidly increase depending on how accurately one wants to replicate it.

Floppy disks are still used for restarting aging systems which lack support for other bootable media in emergency situations and for BIOS updates. As BIOS and firmware programs, by and large can still be executed from bootable floppy disks at times when BIOS updates stop or become corrupt, floppy drives can be used to carry out a recovery process.

The music and theatre industries still use appliances such as drums, synthesizers, sequencers, samplers, and lighting consoles, whose operation needs floppy disks. Industries as well, at times prefer the use of floppy disk than any other modern devise as industrial automation equipment such as programmable machinery and industrial robots do not have a USB interface. Data and programs here are loaded from disks. The industries even now use the drivers which do not have drivers for USB devices. The industrialists do not intend to replace this technology as it wouldn’t be cost effective.

Moreover floppy disks not only store the digital data but they also hold time domain data. So, in order to represent an average high density 2 megabyte floppy disk, one will have to use a lot more than 2 megabytes. This could only be avoided if one interprets the data and stores only those which are important in a more compact form. But this would lead to the loss of original data. So in such a situation floppy drive emulator plays a key role.

A typical floppy drive emulator sends encoded signals to the drive to write data, and receives a similar signal while reading the drive. While writing a data, Phase Locked Loop (PLL) or a software-based filter component decodes and stores the data created by the host. A reverse mechanism translates and encodes the stored data while it is being read. Raw data signals are filtered and cleaned up before conversion.

Since floppy drives have very low-level interface, emulators need to maintain the estimated timing of floppy disk operations as buffering is required in such circumstances. The emulator saves the data written to the floppy in either local storage or in a remote storage device or data exchange module.

 Owing to their versatility the floppy drive emulators support most of the existing floppy formats and thus are compatible with a large variety of computers / keyboards / samplers / CNC machines. At present there are two different floppy drive emulators. Among which first one is a USB version which connects the floppy disk drive interface of a computer to another computer with the help of a USB cable. The second one is SDCARD version which emulates floppy disks in which images are stored in a SDCARD format.