Today I’m thrilled to announce the newest member of BMOW’s Floppy Emu disk emulator family – the Model C. Floppy Emu is a floppy and hard disk emulator for classic Apple II, Macintosh, and Lisa computers. The new Model C introduces an eye-catching 1.3-inch 128×64 OLED display, with crisp text and amazing contrast. Fonts are more detailed, and the OLED shows eight lines of text for better context when scrolling through a long list of filenames. The new display is a real treat for the eyes.
The extra resolution of the OLED helps a lot. Text characters are 5×7, compared to 3×6 characters on the previous generation LCD. This provides a nice improvement in legibility.
The Model C also features a new push-pull style micro-SD card holder, for improved durability. Some past customers lobbied for the change to a push-pull vs push-push style, and after some experimentation I decided that I agreed. This is the same style of SD card holder found in most mobile phones today, and if you’re the sort of person who’s constantly inserting and removing the SD card then you’ll appreciate this change.
With the introduction of the Model C, Floppy Emu is also moving to a gloss piano black color scheme. It won’t impact the disk emulation, but it sure looks good.
The same great disk emulation features from earlier models are also supported in the Model C. It’s directly compatible with the entire Apple II line, emulating 5 1/4 inch disks, 3 1/2 inch disks, or Smartport hard disks all without the need for a separate adapter. Of course classic Macintosh and Lisa disk emulation is supported too. Model C reads and writes emulated 140K, 400K, 800K, or 1.4MB floppy disk images, or hard disk images up to 2GB, if supported by your Apple computer.
Features
- Apple II Floppy – 140K (5 1/4 inch) and 800K (3 1/2 inch) disks
- Apple II Hard Disk – Smartport disk volumes up to 32 MB
- Macintosh Floppy – 400K, 800K, and 1.4MB disks
- Macintosh Hard Disk – HD20-type disk volumes up to 2 GB
- Lisa Floppy – 400K and 800K disks, Lisa Office System and MacWorks
- See the compatibility table for more details
Model C Case
A new board requires a new case, so today I’m also announcing the Frosted Ice Acrylic Case for Model C. The cut-out surrounding the SD card has been enlarged, to make it easier to remove from the push-pull card holder. The opening in the top has also been repositioned and resized to fit the OLED, and there’s a subtle engraving surrounding it.
The new case is designed specifically for the Model C. If you need a case for the older Model A or B, I’ve still got that too.
All of this new hardware is available now on the Floppy Emu product page, or directly from the BMOW Store. Thank you for supporting retro computer designs!