Does anyone have anything to say about BMOW's Floppy Emu? Good experiences, bad experiences? It looks like it could make working on my II series Macs a heck of a lot easier, especially the IIsi's. I don't have any external hard drives for these old Macs, and the ease of being able to flop the SD card between the Emu and my iMac really appeals to me. Having some reviews/recommendations will make it easier to get permission to make the purchase.
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Making working on II series Macs easier
- Thread starter Iamanamma
- Start date
cheesestraws
Well-known member
I absolutely love mine and would not be without it. Things like my GEMDOS project would have been basically impossible without it. As far as I can see it's a really good bit of engineering.
Bear in mind that it is a floppy emulator, so it is constrained by what the floppy interface can do. The practical upshot of this is that the files on the SD card have to be wrapped in floppy disk images to be used. It's not quite just drag and drop.
I have a Floppy Emu I have used on my Mac Pluses, and I think also my SE. No problems that I can recall.
Been a while since I've had to transfer files with my Floppy Emu, but I think I used Mini vMac to transfer files from Mac OS X to the disk image. Either that or Basilisk II, but pretty sure it was Mini vMac. It does add a step for file transfer but not a big deal.
If I can boot from OS 7.5 images on the floppy emu, that alone would make it worth the price of admission. If I don't have to deal with cleaning cruddy gunky ancient floppy drives that still don't work after I've wasted my time disassembling, cleaning and reassembling them, working with just about everything is going to be easier.
cheesestraws
Well-known member
If you want a better floppy drive, it does this job very well, in my experience. I use mine all the time.
cheesestraws
Well-known member
I've got one, and it's been fine. The only thing that I don't like about it is that it doesn't work with multiple input devices of the same kind, only one of them work. So, I usually have a trackball and a trackpad plugged in to a USB hub, and you can't do that. You can only have one mouse and one keyboard plugged in. That said, for most people this isn't an issue, and it's been perfectly reliable for me other than that.
Thanks! There would be just one keyboard and just one mouse plugged into it. Can the mouse be plugged into the USB hub on the keyboard, or does it have to be plugged directly into the Wombat?
cheesestraws
Well-known member
It works on a hub. In fact, you pretty much have to, if you want both, the wombat only has one USB port.
Daniël
Well-known member
A suitable USB PCI card might be a cheaper option though, in the case of the beige G3. An NEC Chipset-based card should work fine under OS 9 and up, maybe even OS 8.
There's my problem. It's really hard to find ones that work in OS 8. I am sure he'd love to have the USB Keyboard as well, though. I'll try looking a little harder for the PCI cards.
jeremywork
Well-known member
In my experience any OS 9 compatible USB card will work in 8.6 with the USB extensions copied from OS 9. Even simple devices like a mouse will probably only work once you reach the desktop though, so the Wombat is a more comprehensive option, even without considering non-PCI macs.
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