Emax

If that be the case then why hasn't someone in our EMax group simply said
Hey peeps!
XY or Z drive works
Buy model number so and so
Set DS to whatever by doing ABC
And voila! There you are!
As you you said in your post "the "heavy lifting" has been done  already
Quite frankly this shouldn't have to be 
All 'smoke and mirrors' and really, most of us are musicians first and not all that technically qualified to dig as deep as we have had to go just to get units that are only 28 years old functioning as they should.
Case in point I have a 1962 Studebaker Lark automobile and I can find rotors, distributor parts, and brake shoes all day long still down at The auto parts store here where I live in California. Seriously, i am not pulling your leg. Aftermarket parts still available for a 51 year old car whose company went out of business in 1966!
Technology changes it's protocol in less than five years and the stuff ten years old is damned near obsolete or redundant to the point that you can't even find functioning parts for it anymore. Why technology chose to go this 5 year planned obsolescence thing is beyond me but it's 
Rather frustrating actually.



Le sorcière des Oscillateurs mystère

On Feb 5, 2014, at 10:39 PM, <geektech207@...> wrote:

> The floppy drives aren't as proprietary as you think.  Most of the views (problems) people have with these machines is that they're viewing them through the lens of modern day technology expectations.
> 
> Coming from 2014 PC land, yeah, they're proprietary.  Back then there was a standard set by Shugart which was the original floppy standard.  Over time the PC market bastardized this standard, and that's why you/we/me tend to view these old drives as proprietary and difficult to work with.  Not to say that Ensoniq and Emu drives didn't have some quirks, but they were usually just slight modifications of the Shugart standard.  This happens with Amiga / Atari drives as well.
> 
> So just because a modern PC drive has the same number of pins, a similar form factor, and looks like "well, that should work if I toss it in", doesn't make Emu drives all that non-standard.  They weren't that oddball back in the early '80s.
> 
> Technically, the biggest difference is that modern drives don't provide a RDY signal and are hard wired to be DS1 instead of DS0.  Depending on the brand (Ensoniq, Amiga, Emu) there are differences like BUSY being on pin 4, or Diskchange signals, etc.
> 
> If you're railing against the "replacement floppy drives are expensive" thing, then either you've got to go the slim floppy route Jammie, et al. talks about, the HxC route, or invest some time into understanding the differences between modern PC drives and the drive standards back in the vintage days and then find appropriate drives to mod yourself.  Or you can just bite the bullet and buy one from Route66 or whomever.
> 
> This stuff isn't insurmountable.  Other people have already done most of the hard lifting, you've just got to look into it a little.
> 
>