 All right. Here we are. We are live. This is the back channel for the hack chat. I will put the YouTube link for folks in Hack chat and then also I'll put some links for other folks here. So Lady Aida, Jeff, me, we are On video. So how about well the hack chat spins up. Y'all introduce yourselves. I'll say hi later, too A little more. Why don't you start? Hey, hi, it's me Lady Aida I'm here at my desk and I've been doing a lot of floppy hacking lately If you can't get chips you might as well go for stuff. That's not available because it's no longer made and hasn't been for 10-15 years Because it's all the same then right? It's like why use the most modern when you can use the oldest So having a good time here, you know Partnering with me is is Jephler. I will introduce themselves in a moment and We've just been kind of having a good time Exploring what you can do with fast low-cost microcontrollers to read very very low density media by taking advantage of their peripherals and large amounts of RAM so it's a good time and I'm also You know, I've got lots of floppy disks here and I'm learning a lot. There's floppy disks are More complicated than you'd think When I first started I was like, ah, how hard could this all be? Like it was hard and it wasn't hard then it's back to being hard again. So that's that's what we're up to here at the fruit Yeah, I'm sure what we'll do is and I'll pop over to the the different chats and line up some of the questions that I see In the comments, you know the first thing that we'll probably do is have to say like you can't just get a USB drive from Amazon and And and read a draw and read these disks, but anyways Jeff why don't you introduce yourself and then I'll do me at the end Yeah, I'm Jeff Epler. I live in Nebraska and I work with Adafruit mostly on circuit Python But Lamar pulled me in for this floppy project. I guess because she knows I have a retro retro in my heart, although Full disclosure in about 2005 I got rid of all my old Commodore stuff including, you know the computer itself the floppies So one big Fun thing about this is I can go on eBay and for research purposes and work purposes pick up old software. I remember fondly Yeah, so I Don't know. That's what I can tell you for now. Okay I'll start with me. I'm gonna cycle out some of the images in the background. We have some cool Rabbits with floppies and stuff like that I'm Phil. I'm the managing director of Adafruit I'm also the founder of Hackaday. I designed the logo Maybe I'll talk about how the logo was almost a floppy sort of back in day But I have nothing to do with Hackaday now other than being a fan and Hoping to run this video chat behind the scenes. What I will do is I will pop over to the hack chat Once in a while and just put it here so you can see what's going on I have put the links in the video chats and then Here is discord as well because this is you know, why not make it even more complicated And then this is my desk right now where you can see some signed floppies from Was There's a signed floppy from the movie hackers Nine X freak and then I have a little mini collection over there after some later Maybe I'll show it's like some some hackaday of yester yester your yester year So we'll see how see how that goes and then I've decided to try to make everything extremely complicated with my setup And so I can do all these things at once Lady Aida will be telling me things to Show on the overhead. So I will try to do that including things like you know a pair of floppy socks Yeah, so we'll we'll do that and more so So I did not expect to see that many feet on this hack chat Yeah, this is this is our new Let's Let's hit the chat on the hack chat chat because I have to make sure I Specify so I think we should start with The first person says getting more rare and currently on the search for a lot of drives and it's getting harder to get them So bid will Flea markets. I think they're I think they're out there I mean, there's millions of disk drives Millions that were made millions and millions and millions, but I think people don't recognize that they're of some value And so I think that they'll always be available. I don't think it's ever going to be like impossible to get sort of your common Five-and-a-quarter and three-and-a-half drive because I think especially And it's a little bit morbid but like as there's a state sales for a lot of baby boomers, there's gonna be a lot of old computers that make it into eBay and your local thrift store and I think that's where you'll keep seeing a trickle of them So I don't think I'm not worried about them being available like Apple two drives are like surprisingly easy to get I mean again, like a lot of these were made a lot Yeah, so here's You know, just she poo is is in the hack chat So he has his Said, you know, make sure you get a USB floppy drive We should just we should just start off with why don't they work so we could put that in the chat. Why? Don't USB floppy drives The way is to work they kind of work actually which is a little bit sneaky So USB floppy drives are actually laptop floppy drives with a small controller board They have one here so I can I can shoot off Make sure you just There she goes, okay. Hi. Make sure you also post in the chat the hack chat that is Yeah, but maybe maybe if one of you can can do it while I'm showing this off because I have to Okay, so this is a Floppy disk drive USB so inside there's this little adapter board and this is kind of like a special chip that's like an ASIC chip and You know, it's a no-name, you know, maybe I could I look for data. She didn't spend too much time on it but basically It connects with a 26-pin floppy cable for laptops. This is a laptop floppy drive That's why it's thinner, but it's still like a standard. This is a Samsung like these are no longer made But there was you know, again hundreds of thousands of these available The folks who make USB floppy disk drives just get these standard laptop floppies for like your Dell whatever think pad You attach the FPC on there and then this just converts IBM 1.44 megabyte MFM to USB now the thing about this chip is it's very specialized It's only for IBM 1.44 megabyte MFM format of floppy. So you cannot ever use this to read GCR floppy disks like those from Max old max and I think there's a come I don't know every format There's like there's tons of like weird Amiga history, but you can't you cannot ever use these for those However, if you remove this board this floppy interface is a shoe guard 34-pin standard interface. It's just like in a fp. Yeah, it's a fpc So you can remove this part and replace it with Some of the circuitry that Jebler and I have been working on and it'll work just like a floppy drive It's just a little bit exposed. So this is standard floppy This is non-standard and this is restrictive I've also found that this is a little flicky and it's not it doesn't do you know you Obviously can't use this for reading the low-level flux. So if you have a damaged diskette This can't help you like it's it's it does what it does and it's like you can't reprogram it You can't tweak the timings and and it's very restrictive So it's like if you're if you have perfect IBM 1.44 megabyte floppy is an excellent condition and everything's wonderful You don't need flux level. Yes, you can use a USB floppy But it's not it's not for archiving like you can't you can't get flux transitions out of it without a different hardware And you can't read non IBM MFM formatted diskettes. Yeah, so For instance the Prince floppy That doesn't work with a yes That's a that's a Mac 800k, which is one of the most horrifying floppy disk formats that I've encountered It's it was designed for disk drive that could rotate at different speeds And it's a triangular format like the Commodore 64 that Jephler has been working on And I can show hold on can remove this and then stop that add Hold on. It's very exciting. How hard it is to Open up my grease weasel output So this is the output of of the the CLI tool we use to read floppies And you'll notice like all the dots are good sectors and these are non-existent sectors That's because on the inner ring of the floppy, right? There's a less Material so they have fewer sectors And what that was actually the other way around it's you can fit more on the outer sectors on the outer ring because there's more material Mac and Some other formats like Commodore 64 did this they made triangular, you know, there's more on the outside just more sectors on the outside But it you know Apple did this weird trick where they spin the disk at a different speed depending on those sectors and I think Commodore 64 just just packed more Into their soft sector format. So yeah, like this is a kind of stuff that again a USB floppy drive cannot deal with at all It's like what do you mean? You have a different number of sectors. They're in this weird-ass format I give up and so it's scary because people take their old floppy disks that are not You know these 1.4 megabyte and they plug them in to a USB floppy disk and they're like oh It says unbeatable. It's like no no just that controller can't read it the floppy drive actually can probably read it just fine Yeah, and then you know the other thing is the five and a quarters Yeah, so the Commodore format as I understand it they spin it at a constant I think 300 rpms, but the low-level I think they have a shift register to capture the flux and at any rate They're something that can operate at one of four different bit rates and they change that dynamically rather than changing the rotational rate dynamically Yeah, and then we also have these 8-inch ones. So obviously there's no USB drive for this I have to have a human head for a scale Good head that's nice. That's a big boy. Yeah. Oh I didn't realize the Sector the index pulse was up there. There's two because you know, these are hard sectors. So They you know, they have maybe two different one is the index pulse and one of the Sector indicator so there's probably offset slightly so there's like, you know, whatever eight holes for the sectors and one hole for the index Like why not have more holes? All right, so in the chat there's a question a little more could the flux thing be done with an oscilloscope That's 20 makes Ram. I mean symbols you you could But there are you'd hate you'd hate it and You know, you have to watch for the index pulse is it you could do with a logic analyzer You know, you'd have to control a couple pans. You have to put it into you have to turn the motor on and enable it But you could do it You know, I think the thing that's tough is you want to sample at Example it 20 Megahertz is actually a very good number for sampling But then you'd have to get it in and you'd have to like format it So it's almost easier to use a microcontroller in my opinion But you could use a logic analyzer or an oscilloscope if you're if you're desperate but you'd have to like write the script to get that data and like do something with it and then, you know stepping through the Index that to the tracks Like before you know it like you've turned your oscilloscope into a microcontroller with the microcontroller I choose my controller. Yeah, that's true. First I was thinking. Oh, sure You just have to get the trace over the network or USB or whatever But yeah, you got to move the drive 80 times. You got to switch the side 160 times Before yeah, so you still need a micro for something Or maybe you did you used it switches? I don't know. I Mean you could do it, right? Yeah, you absolutely could absolutely do it I just don't I just don't feel like it. It's just easier for you know It's just easier to use a microcontroller because again every oscilloscope will vary a little bit You also need pull-ups and stuff. So yeah, like I said, it's You basically in a microcontroller you might like a microcontroller Yeah, so Dan asks about the the sector sensors that they were optical and that's correct Yes, you want to hold up a sure. Let me let me turn this one around so we can see the hole Yeah, there we go No, I just went past Precision here see A little bit how come whenever you open the disk it never has the index sensor there like a question We should implement stop spindle on index pulse I wonder Three and a half's don't have a hole. They use they use this thing. I'm assuming this is the index Oh, I didn't realize that I thought that was what it grabbed to rotate. I think so, too But I don't see a I don't see I have a clear disc here. Maybe we can look at that on the Sneaky, I Don't know actually, you know, I've seen the index hole on the five and a quarters for sure and then those eight inch ones have lots Give me an idea what we're talking about here. I don't know how I'll blow this away Well now I want to tear open my drive and start looking what the sensor looks like I Don't I couldn't see one on my three three and a half Just you know, there's definitely an index pulse comes out of the drive. That's all All I can tell you for sure. I don't think it's that I don't think it's tiny It's weird I never thought to like look for it because that was never an issue. I had more issues with index pulse location You know, I bet a dash who has it the That mark that you were talking about That let's say grab it you would just put the sensor on the the rotating spindle. That's what I'm saying Okay, I think I think that I didn't understand that at first. So yeah, okay Yeah, there's no there's no mechanical punched hole into the media It's what I'm saying But if you have it you have a five and a quarter you can hold up with it with a hole in it I don't know if you did that while I was yeah, yeah, I did do that But yeah, what so whether the sensor within it could be any technology, whatever they liked Opticals probably cheap and reliable It's an optical sensor. There's some where reflected sensor some disc drives like the The Apple 2 famously does not have an index sensor It's purely soft-sectored. I would just also use a copy protection method and it was it was a cost-saving measure Commodore as well. Yeah, they're like well, let's leave just leave the index sensor out because like that, you know We'll make it a couple bucks cheaper. They were really focused on trying to get it down to like, you know a couple hundred bucks So these are you know sugar drives with with a bunch of stuff removed Yeah, I mean in retrospect, I don't see why they need it you could do you could read MFM off of a DOS floppy without Looking at the index pulse at all because the sectors mark themselves Yeah, that's I think that they're their philosophy. I mean, I think the index Makes sense like once you you know, why do you actually need an index pulse? It's not it doesn't seem That essential I Mean with the heart sectors. Yes, I get it, but like it is a little bit unclear like was it to I Guess it's to like just calibrate the drive speed. Maybe the drive motors weren't very good and then Maybe on the Apple too, I don't know how they calibrated the drive speed or maybe they just said like fuck it, you know The drive speed is calibrated on the motor not on the floppy disc Yeah, they seem to be pretty well calibrated I mean these drives that I have which are just eBay of unknown providence They're they're fine. The software deals with them. Okay All right, I put up the hack chat there I would say Take a look at Some of the comments that are going on there and the expulse needs a formatting right all the tracks in line I was Posting up links and stuff There is a question from one of the other chases or manufacturer that still makes floppies I don't know if they're still manufacturer, but you can still get them. You can get sealed boxes of floppies still Yeah, I got a sealed box of double densities because I wanted to play around with Mac 800k formatting and That you actually need double density discs If you're if you're trying to make 800k Mac floppy drives, you can't actually use high-density discs. It's like I just you know taped over the hole, but the Dense in the magnetic density actually messes with the Magnetic head on Non Mac disc readers, so it's one of those things where it's like it's it's digital until it's not it's actually a very analog Process and especially, you know playing around with these Mac 800k formats It's you know, you can't absolutely read them with IBM PC floppy drives But not all the floppy drives and not all of the floppy disc gets especially if they're if they're you know taped over high density ones Yeah, like it doesn't like this because the magnetic flux actually is Is not designed for such long pulses It's very interesting. Okay question the hack chat if you want to answer double density floppy's read both sides at the same time When reading the data? Double-sided double density. It's just the flux density Double-sided is when you have a disk drive that has two heads And you cannot read them at the same time, but you can alternate which head you want to select there's actually a line on the sugar connector that will Let you select which side and that's the head so you select which head you want not all disk drives are dual head dual sided like You know Jebler was job at or and the Apple too and so forth single again for she for price cost savings That's another reason why they didn't have the index sensors then you could flip the disk over And use the other side Which you can't do if you're using an index sensor because now you have to have two index sensors one on each side of The disk drive although I guess they could have or they there are double-punched floppies And you have one which is very very weird and like it's good. It's good luck. You know, it's like a four-leaf clover Very unusual to see a a double-punched floppy disk Yeah, there were of course tons of commercially manufactured disks for the Commodore that had data on both sides But I'm sure they just used a double-sided system to do the mastering. Yeah, here's a common word drive By the way, just a focus. Oh my gosh, I can hear how heavy that is. Yeah Yeah, it's bending the light around me That's how large it is. So this is the look at this, you know, the Don't make I'm right there. I'll fuse in the back and everything And then because there's green on this and I have a green screen going on You're not gonna be able to see that but this is this will give you an idea and then Atari One as well not as heavy Oof and This is the Atari 1050 I Haven't done anything with the Atari disks yet My impression is they are a lot closer to PC drives and the copy protection isn't as interesting We'll find out though Yeah, like we're slowly so like, you know, the first thing we did was get IBM PC formatting and IBM PC use Mfm and and you know, even the later Macs like I was talking about it Mac 800k because I'm personally emotionally invested in Mac 800k floppies whereas your Jeff is emotionally invested in the Commodore 64 and While we're emotionally invested in those it's it's easier to get going with IBM Mfm format because eventually that one Everyone was like, you know, yes, we could squeeze more into data into a disk get using the triangular sectors and like variable speeds, but you know what it's easier if everyone just has the same hardware and The disk drives that you can get really are optimized for Mfm like at the analog level the way that they Greed and manage the gain of the flux head is is dependent on Mfm like they want Mfm pulses And they want that kind of formatting And the cheaper the drive the the more specific the more tuned it was right So it's like you really couldn't use anything else So what Jepler has done, which is really cool is at Mfm formatting parsing to circuit Python Which I think is hilarious. So you can actually read the disk as a SD like Into a USB storage device. It's a USB storage device. It shows up. We're gonna try to get the icon to look like that Yeah, and the reason yes, you can well it actually autumn and windows automatically puts the floppy disk icon If it's a 1.44 megabyte because it's like that. I like this one else could be this isn't any track two heads Okay, like I know what it is. This is a floppy drive and the reason it's so easy is because IBM Mfm formatting is the same exact formatting that you use for SD cards It's the second SD card to the operating system and a floppy disk are identical It looks the same in format 512 byte sectors right which is funny because it's like when you interface with an SD card You're like, how come we use 512 bytes? Where this idea 512 bytes come from? It's like that came from a floppy disk You know, it's like this these these things came up with the idea of using 512 byte sectors and you know in so in the history of time It's it's like those stories of like wire roads Why are trains like this wide and it like goes back to like Two horse carriages in Rome right like they fixed a standard gauge. They fixed a standard sector size So the code that the scuzzy commands to read and write from a floppy disk and SD card They write the sectors in the same format using you know fat fat 12 and fat 16 Before I type this in the in the hack chat you made that work the the USB floppy with the 1.44s and the 1.2s, right? Um, I got it working with the 360 K with the 360 K are yeah It's mostly an issue of like you have to you have to kind of hard code like if it's a 360 K How many sectors are you expecting and I just kind of like only had it? I have like I had like one five and a quarter disk and it was like a 360 K So like I got that working, you know, but I didn't I just don't have a 720 And I didn't I know I do now. I'm going to I'm going to check I ordered some double density disks And I have a 1.2 and so that should be able to get those working It's just a matter of like you just in the the floppy definition. There's a little table of like how many sectors you're expecting Although we could you know do that dynamically by reading track one and just kind of counting how many Yeah, yeah, and there's a spot in the boot block. So that very first block Which says what the floppy geometry is supposed to be so couple different work one thing is we've been It's hard to keep track of all this So we've been posting like these little these little videos So if you go to our YouTube channel, there's a playlist that goes one by one by one by one by one Because I forgot that we did 800k one until I'm like, oh, yeah We have the thumbnail of it and it has the more rode 800k on it. So that's how we that's how I remember stuff I'm going to put a link to that in the chat so folks can follow along because we're gonna probably keep adding more videos to that playlist Yeah, so the next thing go and I'll do another one minute video for you. Yeah So Nick has a question about this is this is and this is the thing I was like if I'm gonna teach you one thing during this hack chat You think that the floppy drive would not care if it's GCR or MFM because you would think it's a flux pulse Flux who cares the flux pulse comes out. It's the controller that determines how to code it and that's actually not true It should be true, but it's not true. So if you look at You know this reading This is a Sony MPF 920 And the Sony MPF 920 is a wonderful disk drive that doesn't care whether it's a GCR or MFM formatted It's very it's a very fine disk drive. I like it very very much Because it's happy to read both GCR width pulses and MFM width pulses are different widths But if I swap it for my least favorite Well, I don't want to say it out loud because I don't hurt feelings But this Panasonic is actually not too bad, but it's the it's the teak. That's actually quite naughty The sorry the neck the neck FD1231m, okay? Very naughty drive very inexpensive because it does not read GCR length flux pulses it actually freaks out because it was really really designed only to read the 234 microsecond pulse widths of MFM and the automatic gain for the magnetic read head It can probably write them because like writing is whatever you just write whatever width length you want But the read head if the pulses are too short it gets filters them out and if when the pulses get too long The automatic gain control starts like it Starts ramping up way too quickly and it starts reading phantom flux pulses So when I you know, maybe I'll hook this up and I'll I'll try a discreet so you can see the very short pulses and the very long pulses Depending on where they are and that the the length of the triangular tracks won't read but the middle ones read fine Because the lengths of the GCR pulses don't match up with the the kind of standard MFM 234 microsecond pulses So it should work, but it doesn't always but Sony drives are okay if you're lucky enough to get a Sony drive Where'd you pick up yours case on us? When I get a Sony when I ebay did I specifically look for a Sony drive because I specifically want to read these mac 800 So I'll try I'll try swapping it out and I'll see if I can replicate, you know, I ironically it might just work because It you know, it does depend on because criminals Yeah, I got some of my starter hardware from a local friend and he gave me one Sony and one is a pronounced teak Drive I see teak, but yeah, I don't know and yeah I can report the same thing that the Sony will read the Mac floppy with our our little board and the teak won't so Just one of those things Yeah, I mean Sony I think was using some Apple products. It's not surprising. They're probably like well We'll have one controller for all of them. Yeah, and they're probably a little bit more expensive but like if you're if you're selling IBM PC towers for $999 you're gonna pick, you know, are you gonna go with the the $25 or the $35 drive? well, do you think that this optimization for the the two three and four microsecond pulses was for Achieved was it for cost savings or was it to make more reliable? Because I think they also occurs to me. I think it's a combination, right? I think that It could be that the the game control or the floppy head wasn't yet the read Sensor wasn't as good. And so they're like, okay, well, we have more Spurious flux pulses and so we have to have stronger filtering To account for that and so it's kind of like a side effect You know, if you have like a very good quality read head you probably don't have a lot of Spurious readings, but if you're going with a cheaper one, I mean, I'm assuming like I don't know would be great to Get an NEC floppy Say the truth, but if I if I had to get I mean like I From from when I was building PCs as a kid, you know, Sony drives were the nice drives and and NEC drives were not we're not as nice Someone in chat said it's like about this work. I have code. I wrote in college on some floppy as I implemented our say encryption I was a senior in 86 when I was a senior me ran on a Vax 11 780. Yep. Vax nips are based on this machine I'd really like to see how fast it runs on my M1 Mac mini. Yep The best day to copy your data off of floppies is today Yeah, that is a hundred percent Yeah, because it may not be there tomorrow well when the Neil came over and we Were first trying to figure out if we could get what's off the Prince floppy We had a USB floppy drive and you pop it in and it's like oh makes noise doesn't show up Oh guess guess the data rotted away Then we had a power book 180 popped it in worked and then we're like oh this is This requires us to look into What's going on because most people I think probably do that and they have Floppies that they're about to toss or they try it. They have a USB drive. There's a format that's not being run if it's the the real floppies the the five and a The five inch ones then you have a really big problem because they don't make a USB drive for that. So Anyways Yeah, I'm imaging a disk on the NEC and then I'll I'll once it comes up with a graph I'll show what it looks like to read a GCR disk on On a non Sony Sony drive, I mean like I think this is important because again if people are imaging floppies You know, we want to we want to categorize and classify all of these different disk drives for like these kind of weird-ass formats because it does matter and a lot of you know, a lot of these discs are going bad because like even the comma 64 ones, especially like I have to clean that head every single disk like I have like my my bottle of like 99% IPA and have a q-tips and I clean the clean the head off because the magnetic Mediac flicks off like you can hear it. It's it's scratching and like one disk if it's if it's flaking off It can it'll it'll scratch all the discs afterwards if we very careful and people don't realize it could be the drive That's bad. Not the disc. Get that's bad And then I'm gonna just put this because we're gonna be finished with action soon. This is probably a good Question to answer. How long do you think the data is gonna be get someone says up to 30 years? It looks like they've it's been fine I think it's gonna depend on all sorts of things where you live the humidity Where how was it stored was it crushed was it I'm sure it's five and a quarter is definitely not gonna do as well as three and a half So three and a half sir. I think they're they're protected a lot better They come with their own case and they come with a harder case I think that the five and a quarter have seen a lot more damage To them than that three and a half. There's just more dust that gets in too Yeah, I don't know the answer to how long is the data likely to be good But if you get that discount and put it in a drive, I feel like it should be for archiving it rather than oh I'll just see if this game loads and then decide what to do Yeah, I think move number one is get it in the most durable format you can into your computer Yes, this is me reading This is the neck. Maybe it's a Panasonic that had more trouble, but you can see as you get to Those higher track numbers you start seeing, you know, these bees are bad You know, I read them with the Sony and every every track was totally every sector was totally fine But even with retries like we trying five times per sector, especially as you get to the higher tracks And you see it kind of starts where the GCR pulses change because the number of Sectors Start start changing microseconds of one flux changes to start changing and That's what I'm saying and also you can see there's a difference between the heads The top head is is tuned a little bit different than the bottom one The bottom one is actually a little bit more able to read the the sectors correctly. So it's it's totally like The the the concept of oh, it's a flux pulse. It's a flux pulse. It's actually not true What you're getting out of your disk drive can is is filtered data. It's not the raw data It's gone through an analog stage that is Filtering and adjusting what it's reading. And so it's not always it's not always trustworthy is what I'm saying the drives aren't just drives They're complicated systems couple of questions in the hack chat if you want to check them out looks like Someone stored to five and quarters What'd be the most durable format for storing data at home now and then some folks said that baking the the yeah, the disk could potentially work and Yeah, I guess I'm gonna agree like it's SSDs are probably The most adorable. I think something that is is live and you Continuously make sure you are copying it on to whatever we're using tomorrow You know something that you put away You don't know the status of it and if you've got like a mirrored SSD or even a hard drive in your computer You have some warning when something goes wrong You copy the data around the only thing that works is to be active and proactive about your data Not say oh an SSD will be valid for 40 years. So I'll come back in 35 years. Yeah, that's that's never gonna work I always like to look at the calendar and say oh my warranties gonna go on this like MacBook So I should just I should just I should just get another one back it up I just put a nail through it and just at least have that level of control instead of just It happening Not expectably, but I haven't done that but I think you're right like what I've been doing is I whatever media format I have I try to cycle it out like one is none and two is few and so I'm always kind of like Making sure there's two copies of something And there's never just one so I don't know if that helps Some folks have clay tablets as a storage medium. Yeah, I guess Need a lot All right Thomas actually asks, can you still scope approach give better chances of recovering old data and The answer is yes, maybe but only if you're skipping over the that Drive Automatic gain control on the head right if the head is unable to read stuff You can't skip over it if you want to and solder directly to the sensor and like you'll probably need to put your own You know gain circuitry on it to to read it, but I feel like I've read a war story where some guy who was preserving Yeah, you can do it and you can read it It's a hell of a lot of work in theory, you know, if there is one bit errors You can't fix it like for the GCR pulse thing, right? Like I actually looked at the flux pulses from this NEC drive To look at you know, like what's going on and I compared the flux pulses from the Sony disk and I could see like if you do a Histogram of the flux pulses, which is actually like the best way to would analyze it because you should see like three Spikes for the three different, you know if MFM you would see three spikes with GCR I think it's like three or five spikes I don't remember and you start to see like little bumps in other values And when you look at that the flux data itself you could see oh if I took these three and added them together They would be a value, you know, there to be a valid number So there there are some if that's the kind of errors you're getting where your flux pulses are weak enough that The the head isn't reading them and so it starts to season maybe multiple inversions or it gets confused You know, I actually think that there is a You know Python plus numpy just sit down and just do a lot of statistical analysis And you can glue together and then do the CRCs on Because GCR, there's only a couple of different valid values. It's like four. It's like Five bits that can code four or so four then codes three or something you you could kind of like mess around and maybe like Brute force it to try to figure out what the valid values are Or you could again try multiple drives. You're gonna get different responses depending on them I actually found the story. I'm thinking of it's a hackaday So I will drop that in the hackchat kind of as a way to close this out. Yeah All right Yeah, you can do it. It's very interesting again. It's like When I first got, you know, a floppy just like a month ago like I or or Christmas break I think I got some floppy drives. I started a date. I was like, oh, it's it's digital data out What's the big deal? And it's like, oh boy, like that was an assumption, you know Like it's 99% of the time. Yes, and then and then 1% isn't but um, you know, I'm still thinking about that You know that the floppy analysis for for GCR, but for now, I'm just gonna stick with this Sony drive All right, thanks everybody We had a floppy time Phil do you want to do you want to show off the well? Yeah, what I thought I would do yeah What I thought I would do is because I I brought this This hackaday stuff here in this other thing, so I'm just gonna maximize my window here so you can see the overhead My microphone should still work and then I'm gonna move me around here so I can actually go over here So let's see some of that. All right y'all can see that. So here is the the giant eight-inch Is that the one that is directly powered off of like AC voltage Yeah for the eight-inch drive we actually you know, I got separately an eight-inch Disc drive holder just because it looked really cool to be honest I was like, this is the cool it's like this like big enclosure But it turns out I actually need it because this runs off of 120 volt and I did a new belt for this because the belt was missing but you can see it has a belt now and You know, we've got the cable to and this one I feel like is in good condition Let it solder. Let me tell you guys. It's like a fucking miracle. I mean look at this thing. It looks new And it's it's at least 40 years old and it's still shiny and every solder joint is like this beautiful Marking and I think the heads look good too. So I think this was this was a good a good fine But yeah, it's it's 120 volt powered and you actually have to get a different You have to be careful because there's 120 volt 60 Hertz and to 2050 Hertz and the Hertz Is used as part of the timing for the belt so you have to get different belts Depending on whether it's a 60 Hertz or a 50 Hertz drive. It's very exciting Part of the collection of weird things that's the that's the eight inch drive cable It's an edge edge connect aside just from And then I got this clear one that was just kind of interesting when we were buying up some things and then this is from Phantom Preak from the movie hackers and then this cuz I just had to bring stuff from the wall over here because there were some floppies This is a some previous hack day things you could see till the anniversary it says Here's a badge that we did a little time ago and then I Also got some pins here So this concludes the tour of the desk here. Oh, yeah, and I think I should have floppy socks It's all floppy all the time So there's like no processor as we would understand the term today on that old eight inch floppy It's logic and it's logic yet. Not there's no like microcontroller or micro processor I don't think although the Commodore 64 did which is fascinating. There's a separate chip that reads like what your commands basically and Handles your your disk drive reading and writing which is which is Amazing the Commodore 64 is like it's a kind of a mystical different land of You know It's like a Madagascar of floppy disk design. It's like okay. I didn't think of doing that But it's interesting that you did and like I'm sure there's a good reason for it. All right. Well, thank you Jeff and Lady Aida For being part of this We did it everybody who's watching. Yeah, all right. I'll see you Later tonight Jeff Yeah, keep tuning in for later on. We're gonna be doing lots more show and tells shows and more Lots of exciting stuff just wrapping up that stuff now. All right back to the floppy. Okay?