How Many Phones Sport A 5 And 1/4 Diskette Drive? This One.

It all started with a sarcastic comment right here on Hackaday.com: ” How many phones do you know that sport a 5 and 1/4 inch diskette drive?” — and [Paul Sanja] took that personally, or at least thought “Challenge accepted” because he immediately hooked an old Commodore floppy drive to his somewhat-less-old smartphone. 

The argument started over UNIX file directories, in a post about Redox OS on smartphones— which was a [Paul Sajna] hack as well. [Paul] had everything he needed to pick up the gauntlet, and evidently did so promptly. The drive is a classic Commodore 1541, which means you’ll want to watch the demo video at 2x speed or better. (If you thought loading times felt slow in the old days, they’re positively glacial by modern standards.) The old floppy drive is plugged into a Google Pixel 3 running Postmarket OS. Sure, you could do this on Android, but a fully open Linux system is obviously the hacker’s choice. As a bonus, it makes the whole endeavor almost trivial.

Between the seven-year-old phone and the forty-year-old disk drive is an Arduino Pro Micro, configured with the XUM1541 firmware by [OpenBCM] to act as a translator. On the phone, the VICE emulator pretends to be a C64, and successfully loads Impossible Mission from an original disk. Arguably, the phone doesn’t “sport” the disk drive–if anything, it’s the other way around, given the size difference–but we think [Paul Sajna] has proven the point regardless. Bravo, [Paul].

Thanks to [Joseph Eoff], who accidentally issued the challenge and submitted the tip. If you’ve vexed someone into hacking (or been so vexed yourself), don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

We wish more people would try hacking their way through disagreements. It really, really beats a flame war.

13 thoughts on “How Many Phones Sport A 5 And 1/4 Diskette Drive? This One.

    1. See also: google results for android dvd on the xda forums in either the tab s8 or tab s4 section.

      They can wrangle dvd drives too if they’re special drives. Dvd video playback otoh is.. ehh.

      Put this on the long list of ” live in na with locked bootloader, dont want to go pixel, could I do this with a phone to replace a notebook or seperate pc” problems.

  1. Uh… No?
    Hanging a device off a cable doesn’t make it part of the phone.

    My phone doesn’t have a gigantic “electrical grid” just because I am charging it.

    That drive isn’t even physically attached. If they had glued the phone to it you could make an argument, but as it is it’s a silly claim.

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