Comments on: FC5025: The Review, Part I

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:31:18 +0000

I’m still keeping all of my old disks too, even the ones I’ve already transferred over using the 1541 Ultimate (and the x1541 before that). I learned the hard way with CDs and mp3s — there was a time that 96k was acceptable. Any rips I did that are lower than 192k I’m redoing, and with the current explosion of hard drive sizes we’re witnessing, I may go back and rip to FLAC eventually.

Perhaps “worthless” *is* too harsh — but, if the FC5025 were a car, it would be a car that only went north, and couldn’t go south. The inability to read the back side of a flippy is a big, big deal. Without that, all you have is the ability to connect a 5 1/4 floppy drive to your PC and dump PC diskettes — something you can already do without the FC5025. My Dell workstation still has an on board floppy connection, Windows 7 supports it, and programs like WinImage will let you “encapsulate” a floppy disk.

One of the drive modifications I linked to requires wiring two TEAC floppy drives together — and now that I own two, I may do just that and see how it goes.

I am still keeping one eye on the KryoFlux. If it does everything it claims to be able to do (including dumping copy protected disks, supporting more formats than the FC5025, and the ability to dump the back side of flippy disks), the FC5025 will be a memory 2 years from now.

By: shadow

shadow — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:54:40 +0000

Who’s laughing now?

Your cousin Jerry Davidson said that Commodore disks were cheap enough that there was no reason to punch holes and use the back side. So instead of the use/don’t use ratio being millions to 0, it’s millions to 1.

By: Zeno

Zeno — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:40:27 +0000

I have a never used, still in plastic 5 1/4″ internal floppy drive out in the garage “just in case” I need it one day. Maybe I’ll find a use for it when the FC5025 v2 comes out, although I never had anything as grand as a C64 back in the day (I had a TS-1000) so most of my old programs are all on cassettes, which are comparatively easier to back up as mp3’s.