05-29-2015, 10:23 PM
There are commercially available USB 3.5" floppy drives that can read standard DOS formatted 1.44mb and 720K disk (check the specs as some lack 720k support)...
But when you get in to the realm of 5.25" disks, things get really hairy really quickly. There are lots of copy protected disks, disks formatted for DOS 1.x (lacks boot sector info used my most file system drivers), and non-DOS disks.
Also, modern file system drivers don't *really* know how to talk to DOS disks of this vintage. They usually assume you want to add long file names, last access dates, and hidden volume tracker junk, and they do some other things differently. This ocasionally causes problems.
Now, that said, it would still be nice if there were easy GUI tools for extracting and writing files. As it is, you will find yourself shuffling image files back and forth between different, sometimes incomplete and buggy, third party tools.
Do keep in mind the SuperCard Pro is designed to read/copy ANY floppy disk, and there are thousands of different non-PC disk and file system formats out there.
In case you are investigating other options, the situation is almost identical for the Kroflux.
Additionally, I'm not aware of too many emulators that can access floppy disks directly. The few that do can't handle copy protection.
But when you get in to the realm of 5.25" disks, things get really hairy really quickly. There are lots of copy protected disks, disks formatted for DOS 1.x (lacks boot sector info used my most file system drivers), and non-DOS disks.
Also, modern file system drivers don't *really* know how to talk to DOS disks of this vintage. They usually assume you want to add long file names, last access dates, and hidden volume tracker junk, and they do some other things differently. This ocasionally causes problems.
Now, that said, it would still be nice if there were easy GUI tools for extracting and writing files. As it is, you will find yourself shuffling image files back and forth between different, sometimes incomplete and buggy, third party tools.
Do keep in mind the SuperCard Pro is designed to read/copy ANY floppy disk, and there are thousands of different non-PC disk and file system formats out there.
In case you are investigating other options, the situation is almost identical for the Kroflux.
Additionally, I'm not aware of too many emulators that can access floppy disks directly. The few that do can't handle copy protection.