Double sided 8" floppy in SA800 drive

Another thing that tends to bite people with NEC (and clone) PC98 machines' floppy drives is that they almost all use a true Shugart interface (even for 3.5" drives!) and not the bastardized "simplified" IBM-PC compatible interface that became so common due to the IBM PC/AT. They may have the same number of pins on the connectors, but they are not /exactly/ pin-compatible. You can't simply plug a common IBM-PC compatible drive into an NEC PC98 machine and expect it to work (it won't). When dealing with these, the best "fix" is to clean and align the existing drive, but the alternative is to find one of the somewhat rare drives that can be set to function as true a Shugart compatible drive (changing just one or two of the signals doesn't cut it with NEC PC98 machines, it has to be able to emulate a true Shugart interface which means a /ton/ of jumpers, not just one or two). Even today people in the CNC world try to take PC98 machines to "computer repair" shops and get frustrated when the IBM-PC compatible floppy drives they buy won't work in their PC98 computers.