9 Jun
2026
9 Jun
'26
8:50 a.m.
On Tue, Jun 9, 2026 at 3:03 PM Carey Schug via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> 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