On 4/21/22 16:47, Charles Dickman via cctalk wrote: > Were there ever any floppy controllers for the (parallel) PCI bus? I > Googled a bunch and haven't found any. > > I am trying to outfit a computer for the long haul that can run a bunch of > older software in virtual machines and do things like duplicate floppies in > different formats. The motherboard I have supports all the formats I have > tried, but only supports one drive. It also only has PCI and PCIe slots.
None that I'm aware of--PC floppy driver software depends very heavily on the ISA bus DMA and interrupt setup. Even with no ISA slots, the typical PC chipset provided the southbridge ISA hooks for a floppy controller. Gradually it has disappeared, along with the legacy serial and parallel ports. On one of my Socket 939 motherboards, I fashioned a bracket with a DC37F connector and a switch, so I could switch the single floppy to an external one. Works a treat--recall that you need only switch the drive select and motor enable lines, so a DPDT switch suffices. I like the motherboard because it can handle MFM and FM encodings, as well as the 128 byte MFM sectors. I suppose it might be possible to fashion a legacy floppy controller on a PCI card with enough supporting logic to make it compatible with existing software, but I'm not aware of such an effort. --Chuck