Saustrup<p>My brand new <a href="https://mstdn.dk/tags/mfmemulator" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>mfmemulator</span></a> from <a href="https://decromancer.ca/mfm-emulator/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">decromancer.ca/mfm-emulator/</span><span class="invisible"></span></a> arrived from <a href="https://mstdn.dk/tags/Canada" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Canada</span></a> about a week ago. It doubles as an MFM harddisk reader as well as an emulator, and I just happened to have a 40 year old disk lying around.</p><p><a href="https://mstdn.dk/tags/MFM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>MFM</span></a> was a weird standard, at least compared to SCSI and IDE. It's much closer to that of a floppy drive, than the hard disks we use today. That becomes apparent, when you realize that there are a lot of different standards for putting data on an MFM disks, and I'm just talking ones and zeroes here, not high level data like file systems. Basically, one model MFM controller probably won't read the data that another wrote on the same disk.</p><p>With that in mind, I was a little worried that the emulator wouldn't read my <a href="https://mstdn.dk/tags/CPM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CPM</span></a> disk that was previously connected to an old Adaptec SCSI-to-MFM controller. To my surprise it worked like a charm, and I'm now looking at <a href="https://mstdn.dk/tags/pascal" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>pascal</span></a> source code my dad wrote in the mid <a href="https://mstdn.dk/tags/80s" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>80s</span></a>. I'd call that a success! 🙂</p>