Comments on: Examining And Testing A Small Universal FDC To USB Adapter

By: Albert van Bemmelen

Albert van Bemmelen — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:15:52 +0000

In reply to Y. K..

Sorry Y.K. I do not have or use any old MSX computer so can't tell you if this module will work in those computers. But I guess that since normally the floppy drive hardware and the used ds or dd dual density floppy automatically selects its correct data format. If so that also should support MSX data floppies. Let me know if it worked.

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By: Paulo Lopes

Paulo Lopes — Fri, 22 May 2026 21:35:33 +0000

Excellent post! It helped me a lot, and I appreciate your time and effort. Sharing information like you did is amazing. Thank you!

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By: Y. K.

Y. K. — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 13:29:14 +0000

Hello! Thanks a lot for providing such an exhaustive report. Could you please tell (if you have checked that), does this controller support 720kb floppies? Useful to copying data to old MSX computers, where floppy drives don't support 1.44mb format.

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By: David

David — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 05:06:09 +0000

I bought one of these little things expecting to find a standard floppy drive connector on one side and a standard usb connector on the other side. How wrong was I. I have a few soldering skills but after reading your description I thing I have wasted my time and money. Luckily I didn’t pay much for it. The seller must have trouble shifting them because he threw two in. So I even have a spare.
Maybe if I become a expert one day I’ll have a go at it.

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By: Albert van Bemmelen

Albert van Bemmelen — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 16:39:09 +0000

In reply to Albert van Bemmelen.

I understand that Windows CE you also mentioned normally doesn't support rotating media like FDC floppy drives or hard disks. But apparently this SUPER DISK Drive product does, see: http://www.bophoto.com/WinCE/Articles/Floppy.html
Best of luck!

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By: Albert van Bemmelen

Albert van Bemmelen — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 16:11:40 +0000

In reply to Berkan özdemir (translating to sword,self-iron).

If I understand you correctly Berkan, you are trying to get the special embroidery machines working with a floppy disk interface. And your embroidery machine only provides in a ft232 serial interface connection? The FDC floppy shugart bus interface is a multi wire 'protocol' interface and the serial RS232 interface only uses 2 wires RX, TX, plus gnd normally. See for instance here for the Shugart bus FDC interface connections which also differs from the Wifi to USB connection you are trying to get working: https://www.bytedelight.com/?p=1418
Of course this means that you can not get those two different interfaces connected to each other without some intelligent electronic expansion adapter. Likely with some kind of small memory buffer to adapt the two different interface communication speeds. Sadly I have no embroidery machine and neither know how they work to be able to determine if what you want is possible without too high costs. I am however surprised that none of the available Floppy drive emulators you mentioned are of use because if I remember it correctly some do work specially on embroidery machines. Like this one:https://www.amazon.com/fosa-SFR1M44-FU-Embroidery-Converter-Interface/dp/B07K88L86N
If your embroidery machine(s) only provide in a serial bus interface then I guess there is no real use to add a floppy drive anyway, because there is no way to select the files on diskette. And only older (desktop-)computers did have a standard RS232 port and a floppy drive too. Which is no longer a standard.

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By: Berkan özdemir (translating to sword,self-iron)

Berkan özdemir (translating to sword,self-iron) — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 06:57:59 +0000

Hi i'm the mechanical technical services on embroidery machines i like to biild different new parts or component for the machines and i see the converter secret this pcb works with ft232 smd if i helped i will be happy. I try some convert floppy disk drive to usb in a machine head also machine head is using the windows ce and didnt work with the expensive emulators i mean richpeace,gotek and bita. if i do the correct solution it will be use any machines i guess because my project is connecting via wifi with usb i got some programming feature. Would you like a help me?

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By: Albert van Bemmelen

Albert van Bemmelen — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 18:32:59 +0000

PS: The FDC to USB module in this article probably won't work on Windows 3.30 when there simply is no USB port present on those now most likely too old computers. But there are now excellent small IDE to SD card adapter boards available to at least replace those old and heavy internal hdd drives with.

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By: Albert van Bemmelen

Albert van Bemmelen — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 22:10:15 +0000

By-the-way: The 26 pins FDC controller presented in the article was tested working excellent on both Windows 7 computers and on Windows 10 computers. So there would be no real reason why it should not also work on older computer OS systems too. But in case it did not work on your computer you probably may also need to install the correct Windows driver for it. This FDC USB adapter was also found to be of excellent use for easily testing those older 3.5 inch Floppy Disk Drives. Bad drives may look like working well on a standard (ISA slotcard or mainboard chip) floppy controller but definitely will fail on this compact FDC to USB miniboard controller. Those drives are most likely unreliable and therefore to be used for scrap parts only.

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By: Albert van Bemmelen

Albert van Bemmelen — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 16:21:06 +0000

For more info on the 26pin and 34pin interface pin settings see here Richard: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=19074

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