Good replacement of T32-6 floppy drive?

So far we have been running T2 and T3 machines in our workshop, now we bought a MultiPlex 620 with T32-6 controler.
And its reading from the floppydrive if the battery is out of power.
I have changed all batteries in the machine but I know for sure that I am very dependant on the floppy and the floppydrive.
So have anyone successfully made a backup of the floppy?
Can I replace the floppy drive with a USB floppy emulator?

benganboll said:

So far we have been running T2 and T3 machines in our workshop, now we bought a MultiPlex 620 with T32-6 controler.
And its reading from the floppydrive if the battery is out of power.
I have changed all batteries in the machine but I know for sure that I am very dependant on the floppy and the floppydrive.
So have anyone successfully made a backup of the floppy?
Can I replace the floppy drive with a USB floppy emulator?

Click to expand...

You can make copies of the floppy on an old DOS computer with the proper drive, a floppy controller with a good data separator and a suitable disk archiving program.

The disk format is the old 8" double sided 77 track 360 RPM format.
There is nothing that a standard 300 RPM drive can do to read these disks.

A very few 3.5" floppy drives can be configured to turn at 360 RPM.


Mitsubishi may be able to help you with a floppy replacement.

Bill

hitandmiss said:

You can make copies of the floppy on an old DOS computer with the proper drive, a floppy controller with a good data separator and a suitable disk archiving program.

The disk format is the old 8" double sided 77 track 360 RPM format.
There is nothing that a standard 300 RPM drive can do to read these disks.

A very few 3.5" floppy drives can be configured to turn at 360 RPM.


Mitsubishi may be able to help you with a floppy replacement.

Bill

Click to expand...

That's interesting. Are those Mits floppy drives a standard 44 pin ribbon cable interface, or is the pinout available / well-known?

A savvy guy could connect a micro-controller board (arduino, pic, etc) to the drive and dump the contents of a diskette to an SD card, or to a PC throuh USB cable.

After backups are done, re-configure the same micro-controller to talk to the Mazatrol emulating the diskette drive...
(This would be Sort of like a BTR using SD cards).


I'd imagine that stuff is entirely TTL (5 volt) signals and really simple to interface once you have the pinout.

If they use standard 44 pin connection, once you snatch the data from the OEM diskettes, maybe these are an option for replacement:
Floppy Emulator | eBay

I found this site
EMUHDD - Hard Disk MO ZIP Emulator - EMUFDD - Floppy Disk Emulator

The hardware cost 600$
If he doesent have a copy (Image file) of your disk(s) he can read your floppy disks for 100$