Hacked Floppy Disk Drive Plays Star Wars Music - Neatorama

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This floppy disk drive has been altered to play the Darth Vader theme from Star Wars. I have no idea how, but here's an explanation floating around the blogosphere:

I can't find any documentation for this, nor can I help posting it. I assume it's a hardware hack that manually controls the floppy drive's stepper motor, but it'd make my day if this was done in software using standard I/O requests. Either way, the 3.5 inch FDD finally serves an important function again.

Link via Have You Seen This?

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Music exists because people create it, perform it and listen to it. People are living organisms, and biology is the study of living organisms.

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Heres the Hackware:

http://www.haikuware.com/directory/view-details/drivers/audio/floppymidi

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Or as it is more commonly, and correctly, called "The Imperial March".

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This wasn't necessarily hacked: the Macintosh 3.5" drives were variable speed drives - they'd turn the disk slower when accessing the outer tracks so that more data could be written to a single disk (400kB as opposed to 240kB!). In fact, there was even a shareware program for the Mac 128k through the Plus back in the '80s that did exactly what the quote describes - played a variety of songs on the internal drive.

-matt

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Here's an article about it on the Official Star Wars Blog: http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2009/03/25/star-wars-floppy-disk-ii/

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