So, SSD are all the rage now, and you can upgrade nearly any hard drive to some sort of solid state, even older computers.
But, I began to wonder about floppy drives.
Can those be upgraded? Turns out, they can.
I saw this curious device on eBay and decided to buy it.
I had an idea to replace one of the drives in this old Tandy laptop
So, the idea behind this thing is it replaces the floppy drive completely and just emulates the signals.
The USB stick can contain hundreds of different floppy disk images, and you can switch between them
using the buttons on the front.
Now, unfortunately, this project has been plagued with problems from the very beginning.
For starters, I bought THIS on eBay for $22 and it turns out
this unit can only replace a 1.44 MB floppy.
But this laptop uses 720K floppies.
I would've thought the firmware would be smart enough to auto-switch, but apparantly not.
So, I ended up ordering a second unit for $30, and it had to come from China because this 720K version
is less popular.
So, while waiting several weeks for the second unit to arrive from China, I thought I would plug THIS unit
into an old desktop computer I had and experiment with it.
Unfortunately, the faceplate on ths old eee machine's computer is part of the front bezel, so it will not
mount cleanly, but it wouks good enough to experiment with.
The first problem I ran into was that the software that it comes with is in Chinese!
I can't even figure out a way to change the language, and there was only one software program on the disc.
There IS some English documentation included, but it's very poorly translated from Chinese,
and the vast majority of it is about as easy to understand as Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The purpose of this software is so that you can put the USB stick into a modern computer and initialize
it to the proprietary format used by the emulator.
After several days of trying, I eventually just gave up.
However, I did get one useful piece of information from the manual.
Apparantly, if you just put the USB stick in the emulator, and hold down both buttons when powering it on,
it will format the stick right there. At this point, it will show up as an A drive in Windows,
and you can format the image and copy some files over to it.
Then you can change to a different image, and Windows will believe you have inserted a brand new disk,
in which case you can format and then add files to.
And I guess you could have hundreds of different disk images on this USB stick, so eventually I realised
I did not need the software at all.
And, since my laptop has 2 floppy drives, I could essentially copy disks from drive A to drive B.
So, I finally got in my 720K version of the emulator.
I decided to have a peek inside, and here's what it looks like. Pretty basic, really.
Then it was time to disassemble the Tandy 1400.
These older computers are usually pretty easy to take apart.
However, after removing all of these screws, I was not able to get it apart.
It felt like maybe there was a hidden screw under the label. They do stuff like that sometimes.
I cut the label, but it turned out there was no screw there.
Then I did a Google search, and was amazed to find the service manual in a PDF for this thing.
Of course, it shows exactly how to take it apart, and it appears there were some screws to remove on the screen hinges.
So, sure enough, I found those, and the rest was easy.
However, I laid the emulator down on top of the floppy, and realised two problems.
First, the emulator was not long enough to reach the ribbon cable.
But, more importantly, the interface was different.
The floppy drives on this old Tandy are using a 26-pin cable instead of a 34-pin like every other computer.
Well, I had come this far, already, and I had spent $50, so I thought, "Perhaps I could make an adapter."
I looked through the service manual, and I found a pin out diagram of the floppy interface.
It appeared to use all of the same signals.
So I started designing an adapter cable.
I started with the 26-pin Tandy one on one side, and the 34-pin floppy on the other.
Of course, I also realised their floppy has no power cable either, so I had to account for that in the adapter.
The good news is, nearly every other pin is a ground, so there are really only half as many wires to mess with as it looks.
I labelled the rest of the pins and started figuring out where they go.
The one that was confusing me was pin № 14 which was labelled "STOP."
You can clearly see that here in the service manual.
On the other side, I had a free pin called "HEAD STEP" and I began to wonder if it was a typo.
Well, I found another page discussing the floppy interface, and sure enough, it was labelled "STEP" on this page.
So, one mystery down.
I determined four of these wires were used to provide 5V power.
So then, I had to find something to build the adapter from.
I got this cable which has a male 26-pin connector. It fits right on the existing ribbon cable.
So, I cut off the other end of this cable. I left a lot of extra length just in case I screwed up; I could move the connector down.
I began to wire it up to the other connector. Of course, I had to solder the power cable
onto it with some heatshrink.
And here's it installed into the laptop.
Unfortunately, after all of this work, I ran into another problem.
The laptop just quit working. [Music abruptly stops] It will run for a minute or two,
and then it just mysteriously shuts off.
Even when I reverted everything back to factory configuration, it still does the same thing.
So, I really don't know if it's something I did, or if it's just a coincidence.
But either way around, I can't go any further until I get the laptop repaired. I expect there's
probably something wrong with the internal power supply.
Interestingly enough, I have another laptop here. It's a Bondwell, with almost identical specifications,
and it appears it'll work without any adapter cable.
The only trouble is, this laptop is broken too. It has a blown voltage regulator, because
one time I accidentally plugged in a power supply with the wrong polarity.
On the bright side, at least I know exactly what's wrong with this laptop, and I can probably get it fixed pretty easily.
The only downside though, is this unit does not have a composite video output, so CGA graphics
are going to look pretty tacky on this machine.
Anyway, after working on this project for several weeks, I've just decided, "I'm done."
I'll pick this back up at some point when my enthusiasm returns.
[Outro Music]