Floppies to the rescue

Well, there’s a blast from the past:

Remove safely!

Actually, last time I mounted floppies with KDE, I don’t think free storage sizes were indicated in KiB.

I wonder why the K in KiB is capitalised, by the way. Kilo’s symbol is a lower case k.

Anyway, yes, I’ve bought a floppy drive for my PC. It connects over USB of course, so it’s a bit lighter and smaller than the one I bought last time. Actually, except for this one and that one, all floppy drives I ever owned came with the machines they were built into. Before 1986 and after, I suppose, 2006, very few computers ever came with built-in floppy drives, so if you find yourself outside that time window, you’ll likely have to buy them separately.

The reason I’m again putting up with the slowest, smallest and noisiest way of storing data since the cassette tape, is twofold. First, Atari’s hard disks have a bit of a different format (FAT15) when compared to the standard FAT16. My PC, blissfully unaware of exotic file systems such as FAT15, will happily write to SD cards as if they were formatted in FAT16. I found this out the hard way when all of a sudden all my files had indecipherable filenames and most of them (including the games) were gone.

The eject button seems to be missing some paint

I always make backups of physical storage media and then use the backup, so I had a backup of the entire SD card, so this was not a disaster, but it appeared time to go find a solution.

The other problem is that my Atari STe has a DMA chip that may or may not be of the wrong type. The linked article states that the DMA chip in question is rarely the issue and checking other items, such as an ageing PSU, should be checked first. One thing the friendly people on the Exxos forum were quite clear on, was that buying cheap SD card interfaces is not the right way to stable file systems.

So, I bought another SD card interface that was claimed to have been thoroughly tested. It also used a different bootloader and its SD card, while I could bit-for-bit back it up, won’t even show a mountable file system on my PC.

1. $ lsblk | grep sdc
2. sdc 8:32 1 29,1G 0 disk

In other words, it has become a traditionally permanent hard disk. While my previous interface’s SD card came with dozens of games, this one did not, so I needed another way to get my games on the new SD card. There are solutions using the Atari’s cartridge slot, but that one is occupied by my C-LAB Unitor-N Midi Extension. Floppies appeared the way to go.

I had one other connected and ready machine with a floppy drive, My Sony MSX2+. Since that machine’s OS does use regular FAT16, what I did at first was to put lots of Atari games on my MSX’s MicroSD card, and transfer the files from there onto a floppy. As you can image, that was fun during the first two games, but then it became tedious.

So I bought a USB floppy drive for my PC. It’s from Orbit Electronic in Enkhuizen, 63 km north of Amsterdam, and made in a factory in China. It had a small leaflet indicating how to install drivers in Windows but I don’t Windows so I plugged it in and added a line and a comment to my /etc/fstab:

1. floppy
2. /dev/sdg /mnt/floppy auto user,defaults,noauto 0 0

Without this, KDE will mount it in /run/user/ and as root, making it unusable. I also found that KDE will take a really long time mounting and unmounting, and even create a trash folder on it, so I use it from the terminal, which worked perfectly, except for games exceeding 720 KiB, such as Civilization. Reflecting, perhaps installing Windows drivers might not be that bad.

This slow way of transferring data made me change my procedures a bit. I now keep just a handful of games on the SD card, such as Frontier, Lemmings and the aforementioned Civilization that I regularly tend to play. The bulk of my collection stays on my PC and can be transferred when I want to. This also seems to work wonders for my choice overload induced decision paralysis.

One thing that was not included in the backups, was my Frontier progession.