Anyone have a 3.5" floppy drive on a modern computer?

[MrPopo]

I do, but I often run in to the problem that Hatta mentioned. I still have my pretty large collection of 3.5 and 5.5 floppy disc games. I really need to get an old Win 3.x PC sometime.

Honestly I'd just snag them off of Underground Gamer or a similar site. I understand likeing to own the original media to satisfy your own ethical needs, but now that you have it using an image someone else made which might also contain a fix you need to run it seems fine to me.

[brunoafh]

Honestly I'd just snag them off of Underground Gamer or a similar site. I understand likeing to own the original media to satisfy your own ethical needs, but now that you have it using an image someone else made which might also contain a fix you need to run it seems fine to me.

Yeah I hear ya, I just think the novelty of popping in a floppy and booting up Jill of the Jungle or Sorcerian in DOS would be sweet.

[DinnerX]

3.5 are the newer, smaller, more robust, reliable ones. 5.25 had flimsy shells and didn't even cover the read slot.

Don't ever run anything off a floppy these days. Make an image, back it up to a cd, and store the floppy away. I don't have a USB floppy drive so I use an old pc to do this.

3.5" disks have their magnetic domains packed more tightly than on 5.25" disks. This leads to crosstalk between the domains, and eventually loss of data. 5.25 may be more resilient against physical damage, but in practice I have a lot better luck reading 20 year old 5.25" disks than I do 10 year old 3.5" disks.

I've bought some old games lately and had pretty poor luck with both. I haven't read a single 5.25 correctly out of six that I've tried. For 3.5 it's a little better than half and half for me.

I had a really interesting time getting a 3.5 read once. The metal hub disconnected from the magnetic disk and the bump the hub rested on was lose from the floppy shell. After some fun with a pocketknife, a toothpick, superglue, and some silicon lubricant I got it working though.

[flamepanther]

Floppy drives are mandatory for me on account of my Game Doctor SF7.

[D.D.D.]

Floppy drives are mandatory for me on account of my Game Doctor SF7.

Now that's old school cool.

[Niode]

The last computer I had that had a floppy disk drive was close to ten years ago. Even then I ripped that out to put a card reader in it's place. Floppy drives are completely useless now. I have a USB floppy drive just in case I need to read information from a floppy disk into my computer but there is an internet copy of pretty much everything that has ever been on a floppy disk somewhere. They are completely useless, there is absolutely no need for them in this day and age. The memory stick and SD have made them completely obsolete.

[BoringSupreez]

The last computer I had that had a floppy disk drive was close to ten years ago. Even then I ripped that out to put a card reader in it's place. Floppy drives are completely useless now. I have a USB floppy drive just in case I need to read information from a floppy disk into my computer but there is an internet copy of pretty much everything that has ever been on a floppy disk somewhere. They are completely useless, there is absolutely no need for them in this day and age. The memory stick and SD have made them completely obsolete.

They aren't completely useless! There are plenty of fine games stored on floppies. Even if there is an internet copy of everything on a floppy, that doesn't mean there is a legal copy of everything. Floppies are outdated, but that doesn't make them retroactively useless.

[Hobie-wan]

They are completely useless, there is absolutely no need for them in this day and age.

Old PC set to power on after power failure + floppy = LIES

[DinnerX]

The last computer I had that had a floppy disk drive was close to ten years ago. Even then I ripped that out to put a card reader in it's place. Floppy drives are completely useless now. I have a USB floppy drive just in case I need to read information from a floppy disk into my computer but there is an internet copy of pretty much everything that has ever been on a floppy disk somewhere. They are completely useless, there is absolutely no need for them in this day and age. The memory stick and SD have made them completely obsolete.

They aren't completely useless! There are plenty of fine games stored on floppies. Even if there is an internet copy of everything on a floppy, that doesn't mean there is a legal copy of everything. Floppies are outdated, but that doesn't make them retroactively useless.

BoringSupreez is right. Sure there's a copy of a game out there, but it usually isn't legal. Some keyboards and other specialty equipment can only use floppies too and are expensive/impossible to replace with something newer.

[Droid party]

I have a floppy and a zip drive in my main gaming rig... mind you I never use them, but they're there.