The German Navy is searching for a new storage system to replace the aging 8-inch (20cm) floppy disks which are vital to the running of its Brandenburg class F123 frigates. According to an official tender document, the ideal answer to the German Navy’s problems would be a drop-in floppy disk replacement based upon a storage emulation system, reports Golem.de.
Germany’s Brandenburg class F123 frigates were commissioned in the mid 1990s, so it is understandable that floppy disks were seen as a handy removable storage medium. These drives are part of the frigates’ data acquisition system and, thus “central to controlling basic ship functions such as propulsion and power generation,” according to the source report.
It won’t be trivial to replace three decades old computer hardware seamlessly, while retaining the full functionality of the existing floppies. However, we note that other companies have wrestled similar problems in recent years. Moreover, there are plenty of emulator enthusiasts using technologies for floppy emulation solutions like Gotek drives which can emulate a variety of floppy drive standards and formats. There are other workable solutions already out there, but it all depends on who the German Navy chooses to deliver the project.
This is how the retro computer community does it. Instead of trying to keep an aging 30-40 year old floppy or hard drive working, people make all kinds of interface adapters to convert it to be able to use SD and Compact Flash cards. It’s usually something like an AVR or PIC microcontroller that talks to the ancient computer on one end, and interfaces with the newer storage medium on the other, acting as a middleman.
I have a NES cart that does this with ROM files on an external card. As long as you make it speak the old protocol, you’ll fool the machine into thinking it’s using the same old equipment.
It’s hilarious when some of these old machines install OSes like Windows 3.11 in like two seconds with a solid state upgrade.
We had one of those SNES adapter devices that would let you rip a rom from a SNES cartridge onto a floppy disk and use that to boot the game. Worked great with rentals. I wish she wouldn’t have sold it when I was still young because those things were not that common (and super illegal in a lot of countries).
CF cards use the IDE protocol, just in a smaller form factor. Slap one of those bad boys in an ancient PC, and it absolutely flies!
Someone found an old 486 at work somewhere and put it in the junk pile. I pulled it out and did that swap after I accidentally killed the hard drive. It ran like the blazes. It was a little tricky to figure out how to set the CHS values in the BIOS.
Oh snap that’s so geeky cool!