Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️the best time to do win32 development is when microsoft's entire cloud has shit the bed
gotta pull out my visual studio 6 MSDN CD because the online stuff keeps timing out
and lets see if the internet archive has WinObj, because sysinternals is not responding
I'm just trying to read sectors off a floppy drive that's not mounted because it doesn't have a FAT12 filesystem!
surely this is an everyday occurrence in windows 11, why is this so hard?
ah-ha!
r"\\.\GLOBALROOT\Device\Floppy0"
I'm benchmarking how long it takes to read a floppy disk, for my video player. test one is calling read(512) 2880 times
305 seconds, that's five minutes.
My video is 252s/floppy, so that's sub-realtime. NOT GOOD
My video is 252s/floppy, so that's sub-realtime. NOT GOOD
½kb: 305s
1kb: 161s
2kb: 89s
4kb: 58s
8kb: 42s
16kb: 34s
32kb: 30s
64kb: 28s
128kb: 28s
256kb: 28s
512kb: 28s
1024kb: 28s
1440kb: 28s
1kb: 161s
2kb: 89s
4kb: 58s
8kb: 42s
16kb: 34s
32kb: 30s
64kb: 28s
128kb: 28s
256kb: 28s
512kb: 28s
1024kb: 28s
1440kb: 28s
That's speeds on a Teac FD-05PUW
a reasonable thing to do would be to adjust my video bitrate so that it stores something like 45-60s instead of 252s, since I can read one disk every 28s.
this'd get me MAXIMUM VIDEO QUALITY at the expense of increasing the video size from 12 floppies to 51-68
Greaseweazle + TEAC FD-235HF:
default settings: 97s
--revs 1: 66s
that makes sense. The USB Teac is a 2X drive, so it's running the disk at 600 RPM instead of the intended 300 RPM, and it gets roughly twice the speed.
there are 4x drives, but they're rare and I think they've mainly been used inside mavicas
I've got one but I'm not gonna build a video player that runs off a camera, that's just silly.
but it's good to know I have plenty of headroom on this 2x drive. even if the user takes a full minute to find and insert the next floppy disk, I can load it fast enough to keep the video going
next step would obviously be to measure how long it takes me to swap through 12 floppy disks
if I could instantly load the next floppy disk that'd be 336s to read all 12. obviously it's going to be more than that, but how much more?
maybe I'll run two tests: one with the disks sorted, and one with them shuffled.
I should mod a card shuffler to work on floppy disks
"The 4x USB Floppy Drive is 400% faster than a typical 1x floppy drive, making it the fastest drive available today. "
NOT HOW MATH WORKS
I just realized I'm writing a file/disk marker to each floppy that consists of "FLOP"
yes, of course they're a floppy, foone! this is not a useful distinguishing signature!
Log 🪵
Devourer
joel cretan
babble encat@foone can you blue-green two drives like a dual-clutch transmission? Swap one while the program reads from the other drive?
@babble_endanger yeah. but I don't need to at current bitrates.
gloriouscow@foone there's always Floppy RAID 0
I Built a RAID of Floppy Disks. Oh no.
@gloriouscow exceptionally unreliable in my experience. a bunch of floppy drives via usb rarely works.
@foone so you're saying it does occasionally work
@foone i wonder if i can read a usb floppy from the arduino giga's host port
just need to make a simple protocol to read sectors via wifi
then you have a wireless floppy
@gloriouscow wireless floppy drive is on my todo, so I'd love to see you finish it before me (just so I don't have to do it )
@foone i know right it's just important that these things come into existence somehow
@gloriouscow I was actually thinking of (I have some PCB designs somewhere) making a stand-alone floppy reader, where you have a "READ" button on the device itself, it's got a little LCD to show you progress, and it stores them on internal memory, plus serves a webpage containing a list of read images
Vincent Sparks 🔜 Furlingamei am gobsmacked to learn that there exists a project @foone considers too silly to attempt
</affectionate>
🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑@foone
YE Data sold a USB 4x floppy drive, and it wasn't even too expensive. I have one, and if I'd had any idea they were going to disappear so quickly, I'd have bought a bunch more. Now they're impossible to find.
If you're interested, I could measure the time to dd an entire floppy on Linux. Or, if you want a test on Windows 10, I'd need a program to do it.
YE Data sold a USB 4x floppy drive, and it wasn't even too expensive. I have one, and if I'd had any idea they were going to disappear so quickly, I'd have bought a bunch more. Now they're impossible to find.
If you're interested, I could measure the time to dd an entire floppy on Linux. Or, if you want a test on Windows 10, I'd need a program to do it.
Andrew
Jhynjhiruu
@Jhynjhiruu have you seen the thumbnail for that video? and the icon in it?
@foone huhhhh???? (i reflexively posted a video i remember watching without thinking about it, so imma need some more hints to understand the issue)
@Jhynjhiruu the joke is that he's using my icon for the thumbnail.
(cause I know gravis. he asked)
Ibly 🏳️⚧️ 
@foone @Jhynjhiruu y'know, for the longest time i thought i saw that floppy disk icon from somewhere, but didn't know where
well that answers that lol
well that answers that lol
dmi 💽 @foone @Jhynjhiruu oh, I always wondered whether this was intended (and whether you two knew each other ^^)
very fast foone running at increedibly hihg speeds
@foone TIL you can overclock your floppy
@gloriouscow you can, should, and must
@foone i think anything over 300rpm is cheating
you might as well just use a gotek
Chip@foone @gloriouscow The OA-D30V (Sony’s original 3.5” drive) ran at 600 RPM. I don’t know why the standard speed for later ones was 300. Maybe something a consortium decided on for reliability or compatibility reasons.
✧✦Catherine✦✧@foone i did not realize there were 2x floppy drives!!
@whitequark 2x and 4x!
and I've heard of custom designed models for specialist applications that went up to 32x (I believe it had 4 separate floppy heads, arranged at 90 degree intervals)
@foone ... now I want to overclock one... but I'd have to hack the analog pickup for this to work. hm.
SnowFox@foone @whitequark Can't you also (not on the standard interface) use both heads simultaneously to get a doubling nearly for free?
slaeshjag@whitequark @foone I got a 4x USB floppy drive from japan in box. It was a real quality of life upgrade.
@slaeshjag @foone which model?
slaeshjag (@[email protected])
Attached: 2 images How was I supposed to resist something like this? It was inevitable. It's a 4-speed floppy drive! 1474560 bytes (1.5 MB, 1.4 MiB) copied, 12.8767 s, 115 kB/s It's pretty quick!
Tom Forsyth@foone might be faster to read an entire track?
@gloriouscow oh certainly. I'm just trying to experimentally find the sweet spot for this specific USB floppy drive
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial@foone yeah azure is cooked right now