Hi, I was wondering if you could plug things besides floppy drives into your motherboard using the floppy ribbon cable. Also, is there a proper name for floppy ribbon cables? (floppy-IDE? simply "floppy cable"?). I have a space where I can plug in a floppy cable into my motherboard, but floppy drives are worthless.
I haven't seen any other hardware use the floppy header. I'm guessing because it has a very limited bandwidth.
Why would you, when you could just use USB or something? Too slow of a connection for any meaningful data.
If you like to fool with electronics and writing software, you might be able to do something. I haven't seen anyone bit bang an interface over the floppy like people do with the parallel port, but it might be possible, but the interface is slow. The chip that typically provides a FDC (along with a lot of the other legacy ports) usually connects to the system via the LPC bus. IIRC, it is an 'evolution' of the old ISA bus so you don't have a lot of raw speed there. As for the cable, I've never heard it called anything other than a 'floppy cable'.
If you like retro computing, how about a QIC-40 or QIC-80 floppy tape drive ? However, as fore runners to the Trabant (Travan) tape drive they are rather S---L---O---W.
I've sen things like LED displays converted to use the floppy drive ports, but thats the sort of stuff only real nutters and electronic whizz kids get into. Other than that I'd say iot's best to just accept thats it's just an old piece of tech sitting on your mobo taking up space and doing nothing.
