Redundant Technology: Dragon 64 meets HxC 2001 Floppy Emulator

HxC 2001 Floppy Emulator (SD-Card type)

I was fiddling about the other day with some old tech, or more precisely my ancient Dragon 64 (very similar to the Tandy Color Computer), and became quite alarmed to discover that some of my old 5.25" floppy discs that I use with the machine have ceased to function. I guess this is just down to the floppy's deteriorating magnetic properties? As I still have loads of data in that format that I want to keep (I developed full “geekness” early on) I thought I must try to preserve what I have before everything just fades away...

There are a number of ways to preserve data on obsolete machines but I chose to use the HxC 2001 floppy emulator - catchy title huh? What this clever device does is mimic virtually any 34-pin floppy disc drive. The version I decided to use stores the data on a standard SD card. As the files are so small from 8-bit computers one SD card is really all you need. The SD card needs to be configured for your particular computer/operating system before you can use it in the emulator. This is pretty straightforward to do and means that the emulator can be used with a wide variety of old tech.

Once I had configured my SD card I hooked the emulator up to my Dragon 64's DOS. On a Dragon this is cartridge-based but provides the standard 34-pin connector to the floppy drive on the end. Initially, I set the jumper cables so that the emulator operated as the second drive leaving the original Dragon Disc Drive as the primary drive. By doing this I was able to use the Dragon's "BACKUP" command to simply copy all of my working 5.25" floppies to the emulator with ease. However, this is not a fast operation! It took me the best part of three days to complete the process! After this had been done I reconfigured the emulator as the primary drive. Job done!

I now have my entire Dragon software collection (about 30 5.25" discs) on one 1GB SD card! The whole thing is also backed-up on my Windows PC. The advantages are that there is no longer any creaky mechanical hardware liable to break or floppies to fail. One other useful side effect is that I now have floppy images on my PC that I can use with a Dragon 32/64 emulator program on a Windows PC should I wish.

All in all, a very clever piece of technology and well worth the money for any retro-computer fan worried about keeping the aging system going. I thoroughly recommend it!