Using a Floppy Disk Drive on a Smartphone

Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And today I was just thinking about modern smartphones and tablets and other such devices. They’re pretty neat and smart and things. But you know what they could really use? Floppy drives.

Yes. That’s right. Floppy fringing disks and drives to go along with them. And you know what? I think we can accomplish that!

So to do this all we really need is: a phone, I’m gonna be using my Note 8. It’s not sponsored, it’s just what I have. And a floppy disk drive and in particular a Three-and-a-1 / 2 inch diskette pressure that runs using USB. Implemented a wood grain coating to, thanks to direction I did!

Pretty plenty any of them must paintings, it’s just a generic one I got from Goodwill. And well of course need a floppy disk to write to and read from. I have a high-density three and a half inch disk here that we can fill with all sorts of unscrupulous nonsense. And last but definitely not least is one of these USB connectors, or on-the-go cables or adapters, whatever you want to call them. In fact this one I haven’t even opened yet. 

It actually just came packaged with my cellphone, which become quite nice. It’s just an on-the-go, OTG adapter and this will allow you to convert the USB portion of your phone, in this case its USB C, to USB Type A. You know, full sized USB port. So I’ll just plug in the OTG adapter right there on the end of the USB cable of the floppy disk drive, plug that into the phone, and you’ll be able to see the light come on. And if we plug in a disk...

Yeah. We get floppy disk noises as the phone is attempting to read from the disk. And at the moment there’s nothing on it so let’s go ahead and take care of that on a Windows 98 PC. So I’m going to be using the recently-rebuilt Lazy Green Giant to write some stuff onto the disk. And we have an installation here for Commander Keen Episode One: 

Invasion of the Vorticons. The shareware episode, which will easily fit onto the disk itself. Thanks for installing the shareware episode of Commander Keen! You’re quite welcome, early 90s installation program. So we have the game installed on the disk right there, so we should be able to run it like this. So yeah lets go ahead and do the same thing on the phone and see what happens with a floppy drive attached to it!

Okay, now that the disk is full of things lets plug it back in and see what happens. It could take a little while here for it to read what I believe is the entire contents of the disk. It may actually be loading everything directly from here into memory, just so it knows how to read it from the file system. And there you go it shows up as a Y-E Data USB drive. And so you can tap there To switch the documents and these are all of those that we just copied over.. And of course being that these are meant for MS-DOS, like, if were trying to open an executable it’s like, oh you don’t have any apps that can do that. 

Well I absolutely do, so let’s pass and open one among these apps.. For this I’m going to be using an app called Magic DOSBox, which is just a DOSBox variant made for Android. And I find it to be quite nice. It is a paid-for app, or at least this version is, but in my experience it’s about the best DOSBox version for Android at the moment. You can see I have jewel of the jungle already installed but were going to add the version of Commander Keen that we copied over to the floppy disk. And it’s already seeing something there. 

Now the Manner this model of DOSBox works is you configure every one little icon, or program, to show up on your main menu by going through here. And you select all of the different features that you would normally in DOSBox. In particular were just going to make it boot directly into this game. And I’m gonna just leave it on the disk, I don’t even want to copy it over to the internal memory of the phone or anything. Global settings... So if we go into here we can show the detected storage devices and we have this one right here which is the floppy disk drive. It  says its read-only access, so if we hit request permissions this brings up the Android request permissions thing. We have nonsense.

I just hit select there and well see if we can do anything with it now. Yes, We can, we've full get right of entry to Disk zero as it is now, 0 point zero gigabytes!

So well go back here and do the plus new game and now we should be able to choose the floppy disk. Yes, we can directly right here, Disk 0. So well just choose the main folder here and that is that. Well type in the name, Commander Keen 1. And it’s already enabled it for us on the main menu here, so if we wanted to in Magic DOS Box we can adjust all sorts of other settings. 

We do want the PC speaker because, that is what that is. No sound card, we don’t even need to bother with that. We could even change the icon if we wanted to, so if we want to give Commander Keen a nice little display on our menu we could do that. But this is probably the more important thing for this individual program, which is choosing the main program. Which is going to be keen1.exe, so there we go.

So now when we tap this we should just go directly into Commander Keen Episode 1. Booting directly from the floppy disk. Yep it sees it there in the DOSBox command prompt. And there we go. Wow. That’s awesome!

This is the first time I’ve actually loaded something directly from a floppy disk and not just like, copying it first over into the internal memory. This is really cool, let me get the camera a little more adjusted. Check that out. So we can’t actually tap on the screen or do anything unless we were to configure it to be able to do that. So we can add virtual buttons or we can just bring up a virtual keyboard here. Press Enter. Could start a new game. And obviously this is not ideal Even the virtual buttons that this program has, while impressive in their own right, they’re still not particularly great.

So I can add sort of a digital joystick, or sincerely keys, over here. And yeah you notice how that's, you merely quite upload exclusive keys to your monitor that you simply can tap on at will. Uh so yeah. It’s...I don’t like touchscreen controls on like any game really, unless is a game meant for just tapping only. 

But you know like, this is why I’m not a fan of emulated games on Android, iOS. So you either need to connect an external controller to easily get do not forget a while within the past I did a video approximately plugging within the kind of into an Android phone just through any such little USB PS / 2 adapters. Doable but of path we best have the one port, so which suggests had been gonna need

This is something I admit I even haven't any longer yet tried. So I simply grabbed an inexpensive hub on-line and that I got to have the power to just plug stuff in right here and make matters manifest.

Keyboard proper here, the disc drive proper there, adapter proper there. See what takes place while we plug it into the phone. I can't be accountable if you over voltage your cellphone or something. And yeah you could see me hitting left and right on the arrow keys, the keyboard does appear to be working. So let’s try it with DOSBox. I really need like, a stand or something for this. Hmm. Can I just put it there? You know I’m just gonna put it there. 

All right, once again I have not tested this yet so I don’t know how well this program is meant to work with a physical keyboard. But let’s just open up. Commander Keen and see what happens. Once again loading directly from that floppy disk, which amuses me endlessly... and it seems to be doing it at the, you know, a pretty good comparable speed to like an actual PC of the time. If it were connected to it physically, internally in anything, so. Okay let’s see--oh it works perfectly! Oh yeah. Yeah this is how I would hope to play DOSBox on a phone.

With the fringing Model M keyboard and an actual floppy drive loading from actual floppy disks.  Oh its wonderful! Oh man. Excuse my giddiness but--nah man!

Embrace my giddiness because I am genuinely having fun with this! This is so cool! Dude. Quit to DOS. Let’s try Jill of the Jungle. I know it’s not on--oh they were right back to DOS. Hi there, DOS. Yeah anyway, lets exit out of this. Now I just want to try Jill of the jungle for, well. Yeah, see I had the virtual things installed and I just don’t want to do that man. Get rid of those. Goodbye screen widgets, I don’t need you anymore. Jill of the Jungle.

Okay, well at this point now I guess I’m just sort of getting off track. I’m just amused--oh wrong button. I am just amused by anything that involves plugging in like, legacy hardware to modern hardware. And I know it’s like, its built to do that. On the surface it’s not impressive, but there’s still something amusing about--dang it--about seeing it in action. All right well, that’s pretty much it for this video. I just want to show that it is indeed possible. And not only that but it works pretty well. In fact, it looks like it does cache stuff to internal memory in some way. I mean, I guess I would expect it to.

It would do that normally on a regular PC if you’re just running something directly off of a floppy, it copying into RAM. But I was kind of surprised, curious, whatever, seeing if it would do it even within the emulator here when I turn off

the emulation. And it seems to, like now the floppy drive is not plugged in, nothing is plugged in, so it’s not copying everything directly. Probably just had it saved to its own internal RAM so that it doesn’t have to load it all completely off the floppy disk at first. I don’t know, I’m just guessing.