Kryoflux with Macintosh 400K & 800K Floppy Drives

[JDW]

A very kind subscriber to my YouTube channel is donating a Kryoflux. I am now preparing for its arrival, but upon installing the Mac OS X software, I see the screen below which says a *.jar (JAVA) file is to be used for the GUI, yet that file is no where to be found!

Those of you who own a Kryoflux and use it on a Mac to archive 400K and 800K Macintosh floppies, I am interested in hearing from you! Where do I get that JAR file? Yes, I know I can type "dtc" in the Terminal, but as a Mac user, I like a GUI where possible. Besides, the installer mentions the JAR file, so I am rather dumbfounded to not find it anywhere!

Another question...

The ribbon cable connector on the Kryoflux PCB seems to be only compatible with PC floppy drives. As you may know, the ribbon cable for Mac 400K and 800K drives isn't nearly as wide. I take that to mean I cannot connect Mac drives at all? I only own 400K, 800K and 1.44MB Apple floppy drives, along with a more modern USB floppy drive (which connects only by USB cable, not a ribbon cable).

Thanks.

[brightcaster]

The installer will place the GUI in your Applications folder. Just double-click on " kryoflux_ui.jar"

David

[JDW]

Thank you, David. I found it in the Applications folder, as you said, and launched it. It then complains I need to install a Java Development Kit, so I did that. I then launched it again. It launches but no window is displayed. I don't have the KryoFlux connected, so is that why no window displays? Yet another problem is that it crashes and I get this dialog:

Lastly, you didn't comment on my other question, so I guess the answer is, "No, it won't work with smaller ribbon cable floppy drives," right?

[brightcaster]

Well, I don't know much about the inbuilt mac floppy drives, so I didn't comment on that. I guess that some other users are more experienced and soon will shed some light on this matter.

On the software issue it would be interesting to know which OS you are on and what the console tells if you invoke the kryoflux-ui.jar.

David

[JDW]

David,

I am using Mac OS X High Sierra 10.13.6, which is not new. (Mojave is newer, and Catalina is newer still.)

Here's what I see in the Console as I launch the JAR:

[SomeGuy]

I don't know how that works on a Mac, but in Windows all I had to do was double click on the JAR file from Windows explorer, or create a shortcut to the jar file and place it on my desktop.

Normally the Kryoflux GUI will start even if no Kryoflux hardware is connected. This lets you analyze or convert existing kryoflux stream files without the hardware.

The Kryoflux device can not be used with Apple floppy drive hardware. The interface is totally different from IBM PC style drives. You can read and write 400k/800k disks in CERTIAN PC compatible floppy drives. Teac and Toshiba drives seem to work best, but every time I archive a Mac 400k/800k disk, I usually wind up switching between multiple drives trying to find one that has more luck reading that particular disk.

Of course, 1.44mb disks use the same low-level format as IBM PC disks and can even be read/written with a crappy USB floppy drive and WinImage.

[brightcaster]

There is a patched version of the gui working only with java 8+ which may solve the issue:

http://www.kryoflux.com/kryoflux-ui.jar

It was discussed in this thread:

viewtopic.php?p=13767#p13767

David

[JDW]

The Kryoflux device can not be used with Apple floppy drive hardware. The interface is totally different from IBM PC style drives. You can read and write 400k/800k disks in CERTIAN PC compatible floppy drives. Teac and Toshiba drives seem to work best, but every time I archive a Mac 400k/800k disk, I usually wind up switching between multiple drives trying to find one that has more luck reading that particular disk.

Why then are "Apple DOS 400K/800K" disks mentioned here as being compatible? As you know, the only way to get 400K or 800K onto single sided 3.5" media is to use a variable speed drive mechanism, which is exactly what the Macintosh 128K and 512K used.

Furthermore, if it really is true that Apple drives don't work at all (which means the compatibility page needs to be fixed to delete those drives), then it would appear that not much thought was put into Kryoflux hardware, seeing it totally ignores a significant part of computing history by leaving Apple floppy drives (pre-1.44MB) high and dry. I thought Kryoflux was all about "Software Preservation"!

There is a patched version of the gui working only with java 8+ which may solve the issue:
http://www.kryoflux.com/kryoflux-ui.jar

Thank you, David. I launched that without error! Even so, the Kryoflux hardware doesn't appear to work with Apple drives with regard to 400K and 800K disks, which if true is very, very odd.

[spags]

I think you will find that the Kryoflux supports the Apple diskette media itself, but not the actual Apple hardware/drive.

The Kryoflux doesn’t really care what it is reading; it is just picking up magnetic signals from the hardware it was designed to control. The Apple drives would require the design and implementation of a different board, but that is an even smaller market than the market to interface to floppy drives.

The Kryoflux does the job regardless.

[spags]

Oh, and a simplified perspective... the Kryoflux handles the “variable speed” aspect because it samples at a hardware level and decodes the signals (probably in software). It doesn’t care that the drive might be running at constant velocity because it is probably capable of sampling the signals at a much higher rate than they would be written to on the disk.