The Saga of the Floppy Emulators

I was playing with my Kaypro "1" and I was thinking about what I'm going to do with it long term.  Using real 5.25" floppies in it was a pain, and I know that the life span of those floppies were getting toward the end.

So I decided to to put a floppy emulator in.  Since I had already done OpenFlops I decided to do something different.  Lotharek has a nice floppy emulator.  The difference is that this one can emulate 2 floppy drives in 1 unit.  So I purchased it and waited.

When it arrived I started to get it hooked up.

Problem: the floppy emulator wouldn't power on.  On inspection, it looked like the Molex to 3.5" floppy power cable was wired backwards (spoiler: it wasn't).  It powered on, but the display only showed 2 rows of "blocks".  I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out what the issue was.

Solution: What I should have done was was checked the power output from the floppy power cable in the first place.  The 5V line was only 4V.  I thought the other line was "unused", but it wasn't.  It was the 12V line (really only outputting 10V) to run the floppy drive motors.  Yikes!  I was running that down the emulator's 5V line.  Lucky for me it was well made and suffered no problems.

But what to do?  There's certainly something wrong with the Kaypro "1"s power supply, but visual inspection shows nothing (i.e. no bulging capacitors or such).  I'm really leery about messing with 110V electronics without someone telling me what to do.  If there was a visually bad component, I have no problems replacing that, but I'm not poking around in something running at 110V.

As an experiment, I put the new floppy emulator in my Kaypro 4/83 - and it worked!  So I did some rearrangement.  The images I use on the OpenFlops just copied over - no conversion needed.  I replaced the B: drive with the original 5.25" full height drive - but it's not hooked up, decoration only.

Then I took the OpenFlops and put them into the Kaypro "1" and they work!  I had to rebuild all the images since the floppy images that I had were for the Kaypro 4/83, but that was mostly wait time and I could do that in between other things.

So that's done.  The 5.25"-3.5" adapters are supposed to arrive tomorrow, so hopefully I can get that a buttoned up.