Adafruit's Floppy Board Gains Apple II Writing Capabilities, Courtesy of a FluxEngine Upgrade

Adafruit is continuing its efforts to create open source controllers for floppy disk drives, this time demonstrating a submission to the FluxEngine project for writing bootable Apple II disks on an unmodified PC floppy drive.

"In this demo, [Jeff Epler] uses a standard PC 5.25" floppy drive (TEAC model FD-55GFR) connected with the Adafruit Floppy Board to write a floppy disk with a classic educational game downloaded from archive.org: Number Munchers," the company writes of its latest demo.

The functionality is notable for one simple reason: Vintage Apple systems, including the Apple II for which Number Munchers was written, use a completely different disk format than standard IBM-compatible PCs. As a result, reading or writing the disks traditionally required specialized hardware — now replaceable with a simple microcontroller and an easy-to-find IBM-compatible floppy drive.

"Previously," the company explains, "we've demonstrated how using the Adafruit Floppy interface you can read and write disks for PC and Commodore 64, and also read disks for Mac including crunchy old 400kB and 800kB floppies, which PCs have traditionally been unable to read."

Adafruit has been working on its floppy drive project since last year, announcing back in January the release of code supporting Arduino boards as floppy drive controllers — and, thus, the creation of an open source USB floppy drive.

The company is standing on the shoulders of giants: Its efforts, created in partnership with Epler, lean on earlier open source projects including GreaseWeazle and FluxEngine — the latter of which is, with Epler's new code in place, used for Apple II disk writing.

More details are available in Adafruit's YouTube video, while the Adafruit Floppy project is published to GitHub under the permissive MIT license.