On Tue, Jun 9, 2026 at 3:03 PM Carey Schug via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > > i belive (looking through archive.org), kryoflux.com used to sell a usb > adapter for 5.25" floppy drives. their current web page has the sales tab > replaced by "we are temporarily restructuring", but i seem to recall a > couple years ago not selling anything either. going back further I think I > saw a usb controller for 5.25 inch drives, though not 8 inch, sadly. >
Would a Greaseweazle : https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle do what you want? It links to a standard 5.25", 3.5" or 3" drive with a plain cable and with a simple wiring adapter to an 8" drive. Plugs into a USB port which powers the Greasweazle microicontroller but not the drive (of course) It works at the flux transition level and can produce 'raw' files of the timings of said transitions. The standard software will also encode/decode FM, MFM, some GCR, etc disks. The bad news is that IMHO the documentation is very poor. You have to deduce some things from the source code (it is 'open', you can download the source to the host tools, to the microcontroller firmware and the schematics). Even then there are things it is capable of that I have not got it to do and that annoys me,. The good news is that it certainly works. And it's not expensive. Even if you 'only' use it to read/write 'normal' disks for PCs, CP/M machines, BBC micros etc, it's worth it IMHO. There are host tools for Windows (runs in the 'Power Shell' command line thing), certainly. And it appears also for Linux and MacOS. -tony
