This will take those of us old enough to remember back in time

[Mike Watterson]

There's an XT upstairs, the floppy disk controller has a 37 way connector that connects to an external floppy drive.

Purely by coincidence I bought one of those external drives in the late 80s but have never got around to making up the cable.

I made a cable from regular MoBo floppy port to 37 way on ext 8″ floppy drive. The extra pins are not needed. Similarly I made adaptors to put a 3.5″ SD drive on an Amstrad PCW256/512 and made a adaptors for 3″ on PC. The extra PC pins don't seem to be needed on the Mobo or the 3.5″ drive. Strangely the Amstrad PCW 3″ drive doesn't use the same pinout for the +12 0 0 +5 power connector. When I went to check the 3″ drives a year or so ago I found that the drive belts had completely disintegrated. You can still buy them. Not as bad as the high end cassette deck where the belts had turned into goo and very hard to clean off. Sadly someone banjaxed the main head mount and I'll have to fabricate a new one. Oddly a half dozen poly foil caps had failed on the rec/play amp board.

The actual PCW doesn't go, but I compiled Joyce for Linux (with difficulty) and have a pre-baked one on XP. I was able to read some 3.5″ PCW CP/M floppies in "Joyce", though currently (several Linux updates later) the drive is only readable in Linux wit DOS disks, and inaccessible to "Joyce" and not writeable. Mysterious permissions on /dev/fd0 and more so on /mnt/dev I think my Kernel isn't yet the version with direct floppy access disabled or depreciated. Maybe using NICE22 on DOS7 would be better.