PCI floppy controller

[Chuck Guzis]

On 4/22/22 15:47, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Apr 2022, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> 
>> 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.

>  A feasible solution is a SCSI FDD option, such as the DEC RX23 device
> (which is actually a whole embedded microcomputer built around an 8080 CPU 
> and using an 8237 DMA controller, an 8259 interrupt controller, a uPD765 
> floppy drive controller and a 5380 SCSI interface), which works as a 
> removable drive with any single-ended parallel SCSI host adapter, e.g.:

However--the SCSI floppy is treated as a normal relative-block device
(like a hard disk).  AFAIK, provisions aren't made for alternate
addressing schemes (e.g. first sector not being C0 H0 S1), FM encoding
or interesting formats, such XDF.

One might as well buy a cheap USB floppy drive.   It's a pretty safe bet
that you won't be able to read, much less format, an entire IBM System/3
floppy using one.

--Chuck