PCI floppy controller

[Chuck Guzis]

On 4/21/22 16:47, Charles Dickman via cctalk wrote:
> Were there ever any floppy controllers for the (parallel) PCI bus? I
> Googled a bunch and haven't found any.
> 
> I am trying to outfit a computer for the long haul that can run a bunch of
> older software in virtual machines and do things like duplicate floppies in
> different formats. The motherboard I have supports all the formats I have
> tried, but only supports one drive. It also only has PCI and PCIe slots.

None that I'm aware of--PC floppy driver software depends very heavily
on the ISA bus DMA and interrupt setup.  Even with no ISA slots, the
typical PC chipset provided the southbridge ISA hooks for a floppy
controller.   Gradually it has disappeared, along with the legacy serial
and parallel ports.

On one of my Socket 939 motherboards, I fashioned a bracket with a DC37F
connector and a switch, so I could switch the single floppy to an
external one.    Works a treat--recall that you need only switch the
drive select and motor enable lines, so a DPDT switch suffices.  I like
the motherboard because it can handle MFM and FM encodings, as well as
the 128 byte MFM sectors.

I suppose it might be possible to fashion a legacy floppy controller on
a PCI card with enough supporting logic to make it compatible with
existing software, but I'm not aware of such an effort.

--Chuck