Looking at the bottom of the PCB reveals no surprises. It seems the main chips are not documented in any way that I can find, which is a bit of a disappointment because we can’t find out what else they might be capable of – so I’ll look at what it does in the “as shipped” state.

CH455H – LED drive and keyboard control chip.

The rest of the board is populated by WCH chips. We can also see in the rear, a load of resistors (probably pull up for the interface) and a 74HC573D Octal D-Type Transperant Latch which may be used to latch and drive control signals on the 34 pin interface. It looks like the board has a provision for SPI flash mounting but that wasn’t populated.Īlready we can see an ISSI 32kByte CMOS SRAM (IS62C256) chip which is likely used as a buffer against USB transfer delays. The rest? Well, one seems to be marked “ready” but I have no idea there. I’m willing to bet that some of them control drive select B or A. There are a few jumper headers available, most of them are unmarked and all are undocumented.

Internally, it is a single PCB contraption.

There is a warranty sticker, but at a cost about $20, I couldn’t care about violating this, as it would cost me more to post it back registered than to absorb the loss. Pin 1 of the interface is on the left when viewed from the rear. The rear has the regular 34 pin interface, with no shroud, and a provision for a Berg connector for power. The two halves of the case are secured by four screws through the body of the unit.

The body of the drive is some black plastic, and feels moderately solid with some unthreaded screwholes for mounting if one wishes. And of course, the most important port – the USB port. It also features a Green LED for power and a Red LED for access, and two push buttons – one to increment the floppy being accessed, another to decrement. It features a two-digit 7-segment display on the front panel which displays 00 to 99 for a total of 100 floppies. In fact, the picture on the eBay posting couldn’t be more honest – as it includes the masking tape over the display which I subsequently removed. The floppy emulator in question is this one from eBay. But I guess there isn’t a better time to give it a go. I just never got around to it! I never completely worked out how it “worked” either. In fact, I had purchased one a while back, and I tested it, and I intended to blog about it. After covering a bucket-load of information about saving floppy disks using the Kryoflux, my friend George asked me whether I had used, or come across, a floppy disk emulator which uses a USB stick as the storage media and whether it could be useful to move files from a PC without modern connectivity.

Website to read floppy disk emulator