Tag Archives: floppy drive

The Floppotron Plays “Eye of the Tiger”

Posted on by

Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger will always be associated with Rocky III. After all, it was the theme song for 1982 boxing flick, in which Sly throws down with Mr. T. Given its era, it only make sense that the track would sound pretty darned good played on old computer equipment.

Paweł Zadrożniak’s computerized band is known as The Floppotron, and it’s known for playing many hits, using its array of old floppy drives, hard drives, scanners, and other bits of vintage electronic gear. The scanners make for an especially effective lead vocal and guitar track, while the floppies provide harmonies, and the hard drives thrash around as the rhythm section. Check it out:

Be sure to check out Paweł’s YouTube channel for lots of other Floppotron covers. My personal favorites are Europe’s The Final Countdown and Gorillaz’ Feel Good, Inc.

More Awesome Stuff for You to Click On:

Was Beta Really Better than VHS?
ROLI Seaboard Block Is the Coolest Music Keyboard Ever
Guy Plays Bass Guitar with a Fidget Spinner
Rage Against the Machines Played on Toy Instruments is the Best Thing You’ll See Today
Every Instrument In This Rock Band Is Played by Rocks

Using Disk Drives and 3D Printers as MIDI Musical Instruments

Posted on by

We’ve seen floppy drives and hard drives used to make music, but laurens.weyn’s Unconventional Instrument Orchestra can use “pretty much anything with steppers, or anything that makes noise on a signal pulse as percussion.” That includes hard drives, and floppy drives along with 3D printers, CNC machines and even doorbells.

unconventional_instrument_orchestra_by_laurens_weyn_1zoom in

While it’s fun to watch the hardware play, laurens.weyn admits that the real star of his project is the Java program that he wrote. “This program was by far what took the most effort in this project, as it has to parse MIDI files, make adjustments through an interface, and send instructions to the various instruments to play their parts while providing a synthesia-style music visualisation in real time.” The orchestra is run by a PC and a Fubarino SD; the latter is needed to control floppy drives and hard disk drives.

Laurens.weyn knows what you’re thinking. “Do you think YOU’RE tired of hearing this song? Do you know how many attempts this took to get working? Too many!” Check out his Hack A Day post for more on his project. You can see more of the Unconventional Instrument Orchestra’s performances on his YouTube page.

[via Hack A Day]

RumbleRail Floppy Disk Jukebox: Diskman 8.0

Posted on by

I’m sure you’ve seen videos of floppy disk drives rigged to play music. Simon Schoar took the hack to the next level with RumbleRail, a modular floppy jukebox that plays MIDI files loaded to its SD card slot. It’s run by an ATMega microcontroller, has a 128 x 64 LCD display and two RGB LEDs for each drive that light up in sync with the music. All of its parts are neatly arranged on a machined aluminum rail.

rumblerail floppy disk jukebox by simon schoar 620x343magnify

According to Simon, depending on the file extension of the selected MIDI files, RumbleRail will either map MIDI tracks to the drives, map MIDI channels to the drives or just play as many notes as possible at once. Here’s the RumbleRail playing the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song:

And here it is playing the Ghostbusters theme song in the dark, because it ain’t afraid of no ghost:

They sound like highly organized mosquitoes. Fire up Lynx and head to Simon’s website to find out how you can build your own RumbleRail.

[via DamnGeeky]

Mac Mini Apple ][ Disk Drive Hits the Auction Block

Posted on by

Remember the Mac Mini that was modded into an old Apple ][ Disk Drive a couple of years back? Well, the modder behind the build has now put it up for sale on eBay, to make room for other projects.

mac mini floppy drive

It only has a 1.5Ghz Core Solo CPU and 2GB of RAM, so it’s not the latest and greatest in Mac Mini tech, but on the other hand it’s way more powerful than the 1978 floppy drive upon which it is based. My favorite part of the mod has always been the slot-loading DVD drive that’s perfectly aligned with the old floppy disk slot.

mac mini floppy drive 2

Modder Charles Mangin has listed the 5-1/4″ floppy drive cum Mac Mini with a starting bid of $500(USD), but if you absolutely must have it, there’s a Buy-it-Now price of $1000.


Writer breaks down floppy drive history in detail, recalls the good sectors and the bad

Posted on by

HP details history of the floppy drive, recalls the good sectors and the bad

There's been a lot of nostalgia circulating around the PC world in the past year, but there's only one element of early home computing history that everyone shares in common: the floppy drive. A guest writer posting at HP's Input Output blog, Steve Vaughan-Nichols, is acknowledging our shared sentimentality with a rare retrospective of those skinny magnetic disks from their beginning to their (effective) end. Many of us are familiar with the floppies that fed our Amigas, early Macs and IBM PCs; Vaughan-Nichols goes beyond that to address the frustrations that led to the first 8-inch floppy at IBM in 1967, the esoteric reasons behind the 5.25-inch size and other tidbits that might normally escape our memory. Don't be sad knowing that the floppy's story ends with a whimper, rather than a bang. Instead, be glad for the look back at a technology that arguably greased the wheels of the PC era, even if it sometimes led to getting more disks than you could ever use. Sorry about that.

[Image credit: Al Pavangkanan, Flickr]

Filed under: ,

Writer breaks down floppy drive history in detail, recalls the good sectors and the bad originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 01:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Reddit  |  sourceInput Output  | Email this | Comments

ULTIMAte hack: Nexus 7 hooks up with external USB storage, floppy drive for retro-gaming

Posted on by

ULTIMAte hack Nexus 7 hooks up with external USB storage, floppy drive

There's only so much kit you can cram into a sub-$200 tablet without pushing past the price ceiling. And for Google's Jelly Bean-blessed Nexus 7, corners were definitely cut, leaving users without a handy microSD slot for expansion and rear-facing camera. But where there's a will, there's the XDA and its community of developers to remedy the situation. As you can glimpse from the photo above, an enterprising forum member by the handle of c0m47053 devised an interesting workaround for the slate's lack of expandable storage and then some. Using the StickMount app available on the Play store, which allows users to mount/dismount mass storage devices, he was able to connect the ASUS-made tab to a USB hub and hook it up to a keyboard, mouse and, most amusingly of all, a floppy drive -- to play Ultima on DOSbox, of course. It goes without saying that a feat of this kind requires root access, but thankfully that's what Mountain View made the Nexuses for.

Filed under: , ,

ULTIMAte hack: Nexus 7 hooks up with external USB storage, floppy drive for retro-gaming originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 Jul 2012 22:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink @arnoudwokke (Twitter)  |  sourcexda developers  | Email this | Comments

Eight floppy drives recreate the theme from Game of Thrones, stake claim to the seven Kingdoms

Posted on by

Eight floppy drives recreate the theme from Game of Thrones, stake claim to the seven Kingdoms

Should the robots ever form an alliance and turn against us, all we need to do is call on people like Anand Jin to save us. Why? Because it's folk of his ilk that are the pied pipers of the machine world. We've seen disk drives coerced into recreating Daft Punk, and Bo-Rhap extorted from an Atari 800XL. Now, we can watch the aforementioned Anand eke the theme from Game of Thrones out of eight floppy drives. There's more info on his YouTube channel if you're curious to know the hows and whys. Much as we enjoy the performance, hearing the theme again just brings up bad memories of last week's ending.

Continue reading Eight floppy drives recreate the theme from Game of Thrones, stake claim to the seven Kingdoms

Eight floppy drives recreate the theme from Game of Thrones, stake claim to the seven Kingdoms originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 May 2012 19:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Next Web  |  sourceAnand Jin (YouTube)  | Email this | Comments