I got this on an ebay auction awhile back. I figured this would be the right place for information. http://s201.photobucket.com/albums/aa265/compmike19/PSX Floppy Drive/ It is an Asian made Playstation 1 Floppy Drive, presumably like the Interact or Datel floppy drive for PSX. Differences from the Datel looks like missing the LEDs and buttons on the top and detachable Memory card adapter. No PSU was included, but most of my web and forum searching leans towards a 9V wall adapter. I have not been able to find mention of the DB-25 port on the rear of the drive, assuming a Parallel PC connection (drivers needed)? Drive of the unit is: http://insight.actapricot.org/insight/common/drives/floppy/so520-1f.htm Floppy to adapter is a single pcb with an IDC header soldered onto the board. The memory card adapter is connected via rear RJ-11 connection, wires are soldered and hot glued directly on the pcb of the memory card so no components on the adapter. Any help, and english manual, drivers? Maybe someone more adapt at electronics could make reproductions? Thanks in advance for any input.
:thumbsup: nice find. The Microchip is OTP, put thats not the problem, what really isn't nice, but ofcourse normal is that if done the chip is not readable for us. A few bits has been set, proberbly to lock readout and other functions to dump its contends. http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/devicedoc/30234d.pdf but maybe we can send it to china or recreate its function by looking at other chips and its basic function within the system. The gm82c765b is a floppy disk controller, http://www.randomsonicnet.org/workshop/GM82C765B.pdf Its very basically and nice, we can interface it our self and probably buy more or find a replacement and interface it with our own MCU. Other chips are basic logic and/or Memory (RAM). We can rebuild this, there are idea's to do it. We only wants SD cards instead of a floppy dirve. If im correctly seeing this you can insert a floppy and try to write to it with your playstation. its should appear as a normal MU. The Microchip data-sheet reports a slave parallel port, so that means a custom device. maybe connect it to a pc and startup a terminal session and start poking around. Its my look at this without any knowhow, its my first time seeing a device like this. What i'm interested in is to see is what the contends of a working floppy disk will look like. separate files or 1 MU file with is maybe usable inside a emulator. anyway, im mostly interested in the circuit design and communication done on the LPT like connector. :thumbsup: Have fun with it. Its a very nice find. You can do this http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/ if the format of the fd isnt rare or totally unsupported by that or a device like that. For the rest of us its not very much more of a help creating or recreating this device, unless the microchip can be read somehow (normaly not posible if im correct, unless donated to a chinese or american mcu decapping company. expansive and not worth if we in the end sell just 5 devices.)
Really interesting device, would rock for development. shameless plug: if someone donated it I could add support for it in the PSXSDK (obviously shipping will be paid by me).
it also has a DB25 connector, very interesting. Probably it's compatible with Front Far East's Super Magic Drive as well? The photo on the package looks similar to the Magic Drive floppy: Are you able to test it with a Super Magic Drive?
Interesting you should post the Super Magic Drive, the ebay seller I bought it off of actually sent me that first and I had to send it back to him to make sure I got this one.
You can find a few pictures in this thread at digitpress: http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?t=96276 The Magic Drive floppy is compatible with the Super Magic Drive, the Super Magicom, the Super Magic Griffin and the SuperCom Pro.
The Magic Drive floppy is just a generic floppy drive. All the back-up devices used them before they started to make built in drive units. The 8MBit Super UFO was the first. Yakumo
The enclosure contains a generic 1,44 MB floppy drive, true. However the enclosure also contains a small pcb and this isn't generic. For example, you cannot use an Amiga floppy drive with a Super Magicom. Super Magicom, Super Magic Drive, Super Magic Griffin are all from the same manufacturer, therefore the floppy drive is compatible. Supercom Pro is just a Super Magicom clone. I assume your 8Mbit UFO is just a clone, too. btw, the Super UFO can't be the first, because Super Magic Drive and Griffin were released earlier. Anyway, the Memory Disk Drive has a DB25 connector on the backside. I don't think it's for a PC or Amiga. The enclosure looks similar to the Magic Floppy Drive, therefore I thought it might be compatible with one of the copiers mentioned above.
I have a collection of these, never had the balls to disassemble it. I have the interact, datel, and some generic one. I was going to put in a usb to fdd adapter when I had some more cash.
Amiga uses its own disk format both filesystem and hardware, so its no surprise it wont work. For example you can not read/write ADF/DMS Amiga disk images to a disk on a DOS/Win-system without custom hardware.
The Amiga Floppies were - later in their life - actually standard Mitsumi Floppy drives, but they were jumpered to act as 880kb floppies rather than 1.44MB at that time (DD, not HD discs). I stumbled upon this by accident, got a floppy from an A1200 and compared it with my PC floppy. Same model numer, both had a big jumper block on their case (2 rows, those extremely flat jumpers) but they were both set differently to act as 1.44MB or 880kb respectively. iirc you could also jumper them to 1.76MB, i.e. Amiga or Apple HD format. The earlier ones though were bespoke 880kb models especially for Commodore, though they might also have been used in Macs which shared that disc format if my memory serves me right. Fun fact: By using a software tweak they were able to read and write to dos-formatted 720kb discs, so you could exchange files with a PC.
To the above post, it's an expansion cart for the Super X-Terminator 2 cheat cartridge for the Super Famicom. It plugs into the second cart slot and has built-in cheat codes for a bunch of games. When you have a compatible game in the first slot, it automatically opens a menu in the X-Terminator menu where you can select cheats from its database. There were 5 expansion carts total, that one is #2. It's also compatible with the Super UFO floppy drive backup units, although it may only work with later BIOS versions.
It was somehow well successful here in Greece. The official memory cards were too expensive compare to the rest of the hardware, and the early memory cards were too unstable to rely on them. So a major former video games importer was advertising a floppy disk memory card as an alternative solution. While the device itself cost if I can recall correctly close to five or even six official memory cards, you could save up to fifteen blocks in a single floppy disk. Since floppy disk were dirty cheap back in the day, the basic idea about purchasing it was amazing, especially for memory data hungry games of that era. It turned out that the disk drive (presumably) from times to times corrupted the games saves, so after numerous complains they stopped importing and sell them. I'm not sure which of all those models was available here, however I'm interested to read any feedback by it's owners and if they have experience any issues or incompatibilities.
