Can an FDS be modded to take standard (5-1/4, 3-1/2) floppies?

This is a great idea since the FDS had easily-broken drive belts.

 

Uh, no.

 

Nope. Sorry. The FDS is a totally different animal with the hardware and communication way different from your standard 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives.

 

Technically, I'm sure you could. But it wouldn't be at all practical. You could probably make some sort of controller that would translate everything both ways between a regular floppy drive and the FDS hardware, but in the end why even bother? If you go that route you might as well use something more practical or reliable like flash media. At that point, you may as well use a flash cart like the powerpak or everdrive n8.

I assume you mean easily modified, though. In that case, as others have said, no.

 

I believe this is called "Throwing the baby out with the bath water". Why not just buy new belts?

 

Belts are super easy to find.

Repairing it is another question, but... just be careful.

 

I saw a Parallel port - FDS Ram pack adapter that would be more logical.
No software was provided on the page.

 

What I was thinking was an adapter that takes a floppy drive, and replicates the FDS drive's functionality.
It would work like this:
The box would upload a bootloader into the Rampack, then stays in the Famicom's RAM.
Joe inserts the disk.
The game list appears.
Joe would load the game.
The loader would overwrite the rampack's loaded program (the bootloader).
The game plays.

 

The FDSLoadr? Handy piece of hardware, but requires having an old PC running DOS. There's been a few attempts, and mentions of attempts, made to make something a bit more compatible with today's PCs, but not much solid yet. Chris Covell's tapedump is supposedly capable of writing to disks now, but that requires having a method of running code on the Fami/NES in the first place. And with the Powerpak and EDN8 both supporting FDS games, I doubt there's doing to be much interest in a newer method sadly

 

doesn't the FDS just use quick disks? (Slightly modified ones)

 

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/QUICK-DI...ppy_Zip_Jaz_Drives&hash=item3cd5e00217&_uhb=1

 

Yeah they did use quick discs.

 

The everdrive n8 and the powerpak can emulate the FDS so why bother?

 

Just buy your famicom disk system games and purchase a mgd1 to maintain your collection, thats what I did. I mean realistically its hard to track down an mgd1 and expensive. I spent around 460 usd obtaining the equipment to rewrite my famicom disk system games. Here's to someone coming up with something better.

William

 

Yeah, it's just finding a way to rewrite them in a way that's compatible with the FDS that's the problem.

That's why I think there won't ever be an easy to use rewriting method for FDS discs, unless a real enthusiast takes a strong interest and puts in the time and effort for it.

There's FDSLoadr, but hit-and-miss with PC compatibility.

 

Exactly its hit and miss.

 

Why mod hardware that is considered on the rare side of things? Preserve it for the future. Get Everdrive N8 and call it a day.

 

This is the solution, there's too much fucking around to get it to work any other way. Maybe a cool thing to see working but I doubt it's worth all the time and effort.

 

You can also use the original Bung Game Doctor to copy FDS disks - the biggest problem is finding the boot disk with the copy utility on it, though.

I actually did some work on this years ago, but it never got past the "sort of works" stage - my circuit was basically a PLD (one of those Signetics PLS devices) that handled the FM encode / decode and serial/parallel conversion, a PAL and a flash ROM - it got to the point where you could hook it up to a drive and copy the disk contents to the flash and then copy the contents back to another disk or connect to to the RAM cartridge and get it to emulate the disk drive, but since it just treated the entire disk as one big bitstream and had no idea what the disk format was it didn't work very well.

The biggest problem was that when making the initial image it just copied whatever it saw - including sectors with CRC errors, so if you got a read error you ended up with a sector in the flash that would generate exactly the same bad CRC every time you played it back - this was great if it was an intentional bad sector, but very bad if it was actually caused by a read error and should have been retried.

The other problem was that because it had no idea of the disk structure you could only write the entire disk in one go, and this meant that none of the save functions worked, since that required writing to individual sectors and my firmware wasn't capable of doing that.

I could try to dig the code out, but I'm not sure how helpful it would be - partly because it was never really finished in the first place and partly because I think just about every part I used in the circuit is obsolete now.

 

I have that copy program you're talking about TriMesh