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I can't read a C64-floppy twenty years old.

Yes, you can.
http://www.jschoenfeld.com/products/catweasel_e.htm

Loserboy nerd, you have no clue.

Want to read vinyl? No problem: http://www.pearl.de/a-PX3031-1606.shtml

Need to read old format disks? No problem: http://www.jschoenfeld.com/products/cwmk3_e.htm

Can't read kraut? Your problem. Anyway, it's only your own defeatist attitude that keeps you from doing things that are perfectly feasible. There's a reason you nerds get beaten up by us jocks, we have the winning attitude that you cannot fathom.

Stuff yourself into a locker, shove your own head into a toilet and shit on your own face. I can't be bothered.

Ok, thanks for all of your comments! I'm not sure that anyone will ever see this post since the story is now off the front page, but I wanted to recap the lessons identified (by me at least).

1) Find a Catweasel.
2) If you're concerned about power consumption you're going to have to hack some hardware.
3) There's data recovery and then there's data recovery.
4) Tape in any form is not going to be fun to work with.
5) Any setup that's remotely interesting will grow to consume as much space as possible, however this can pay for itself if you let it.
6) Some people, posting on /., are baffled when confronted with a computer hobbyist.
7) Some people will troll any damn thing. Others will mod them insightful.

Overall, I'd have to say that 'asking slashdot' was a bit of a disappointment. Most of the helpful posts were of an obvious nature (get usb devices!) or ended by stating that the parts of this project I had identified as interesting (size, power consumption) were hard to accomplish. Thanks, but I knew that. I think most of the blame rests on myself, and I should have been more explicit about the areas I was having problems with. In general I'd say that I was too general.

I'd like to end this by stating that, as god is my witness, I never thought I'd have someone on Slashdot ask me why I wanted to build.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Catweasel disk controller yet. http://www.jschoenfeld.com/products/catweasel_e.htm Its a hard to find board since its done in limited production runs.

Have you noticed a distinct lack of USB 5.25" drives? I'm fine with a wall wart for power, but nobody even makes a USB floppy controller chip that recognizes 360k as a valid format. (There's one that'll do 1.2MB, but not 360k.)

I've been encouraging Jens Schoenfeld to make a USB Catweasel controller for those of us without PCI slots. I suppose it's probably easier to put PCI slots on a laptop, though.

Perhaps I'm just in it for the absurdity factor.

Have you noticed a distinct lack of USB 5.25" drives? I'm fine with a wall wart for power, but nobody even makes a USB floppy controller chip that recognizes 360k as a valid format. (There's one that'll do 1.2MB, but not 360k.)

I've been encouraging Jens Schoenfeld to make a USB Catweasel controller for those of us without PCI slots. I suppose it's probably easier to put PCI slots on a laptop, though.

Perhaps I'm just in it for the absurdity factor.

  I have a bunch of old DSDD 40-track hard-sector TRS-80 5.25" floppy disks (NEWDOS/80v2 format) that I'd love be able to read.

They do make a PCI version. But when I bought mine I didn't have the option.

Currently I am using a free Pentium-90 (huge tower case) I got. But am looking for something smaller.

Individual Computers made/make the Catweasel to begin with and to continue with. He's a clever swine, he is (Catweasel Flipper, for instance) and has made a lot of cool stuff.

Individual Computers made/make the Catweasel to begin with and to continue with. He's a clever swine, he is (Catweasel Flipper, for instance) and has made a lot of cool stuff.

Introducing... The Catweasel MK3.

• Read and write 1100 disk formats. Okay, we'll take that one with a grain of salt, but still, if it only can read C64, Amiga and Atari disks, it's more than enough for me. That still can't be done with a software-only solution.
• Use the original SID chip for listening to C64 music - dunno if support is implemented in any emulators yet.
• Connect original C64/Amiga/Atari joysticks! Zipstick! Yay!

Another cool feature is that the same card can be connected to the PCI bus, Amiga's Zorro bus OR the Amiga 1200's clock port. Three different connectors on the same card. Leet? ;)

While it's been covered to death, the Catweasel Mk3 is a bit more affordable, and gives you the added multiformat floppy controller and retrogaming ports. Depends if you want something vaguely standalone or a solution for your 'big box,' I guess. Google around if you want a pic of the card; it was Slashdotted recently enough.

One advantage of the CommodoreOne is that most of the system is implemented in FPGA- meaning it should be much more of a hacker toy than just a hardware C64 emulator++. The power draw is probably fairly reduced from the original '64, and tons of consumer electronics (and computing platforms) are much less efficient, anyway.

Put your hand over a DirecTV receiver sometime. Toasty!

Even better than a SidStation, the Catweasel MK3 PCI board can take a SID chip.

I'm sure I had a point...

• Atari 800XL
• Two Atari XEGSes
• A C64
• A non-working Commodore 128D
• Amiga 500
• Amstrad PPC640 (getting PSU details)
• Another Amstrad PC compatible in a keyboard profile (like the Amiga 500)
• Does and Intellivision with a keyboard add-on count?

The Amiga format actually ignores the physical sync hole in the disk, and writes in a sort of track-at-once mode. It *is* possible to read the disks with a standard PC floppy and controller, but only with low-level access to the controller (read: as a hackerly DOS util, perhaps portable to root-mode in *NIX).

However, as all the 'smarts' of a PC floppy are really in the controller, you can replace the controller with something a bit more flexible, as noted- Individual Computers' Catweasel being the leading example.

What's interesting is that the characteristic Amiga "click" comes from the use of what were then cheaper, non-PC drive movements that didn't support a diskchange switch (not that any PC software actually takes advantage of it today!).

I love old computers too, but I lean more in the direction of the home/hobbyist computers (old Macs, Atari 8/16 bit computers, Amigas and other Commodores, etc) I found something called "The Catweasle" a while back. It plugs into an ISA slot (remember those? of course you do :) and has floppy controller ports for two drives. This thing reads *everything*. Check out the link for the full specs. Think there's a market for getting data off an Amiga 1200 disk?

The other cool "recovery" project I've seen is CAPS, which is a project to preserve exact copies of Amiga games. It's a typical abandonware project, except they are going out of their way to keep all copy protection intact. They are even going so far as to reverse engineer the copy-protection so they can make an exact copy of the original disk!

It's probably cheaper to find a used Amiga on ebay. Last time I checked, the going price for an A500 was around $20 + shipping. An Amiga is capable of reading & writing to 720K MS-DOS floppies - you can copy your amiga software over to 720k floppies and sneakernet it over to your PC. Another approach is to build yourself a null modem cable to connect your Amiga and PC via SLIP, PPP, or PLIP (if you want to use the parallel port). You will have to make the cable yourself - the Amiga uses a non-standard pinout on it's serial and parallel ports (Don't forget to hook up the ground!). I used a null-modem SLIP connection to copy floppy images over to my PC and burn them to a CD-ROM; it took a while but I only had to spend about $15 on the parts to make the cable.

For amiga emulation under Linux (and BSD, and BeOs, etc.), use UAE or WinUAE if you are running Windows. If you want legal Amiga ROM images (and a lot more), get Amiga Forever from Cloanto. Illegal (or at least questionable) ROM images can be found easily enough with a Google search. (The proof is left as an exersize for the student.)

I also dug up a diagram for a cable to connect an amiga floppy drive to a PC's parallel port, and a program to use with it, but i cannot seem to locate it... :(

Only other method is to get an amiga up and running, and save the files in PCDOS format, which can be read by PC's, or use a term proggy and transfer that way, or connect to a network. but since my access to my A4000 was terminated by fire and brimstone my options are limited.

I also dug up a diagram for a cable to connect an amiga floppy drive to a PC's parallel port, and a program to use with it, but i cannot seem to locate it... :(

Only other method is to get an amiga up and running, and save the files in PCDOS format, which can be read by PC's, or use a term proggy and transfer that way, or connect to a network. but since my access to my A4000 was terminated by fire and brimstone my options are limited.