Hacked Floppy Disk Drive Plays Star Wars Music

By John Farrier in Film, Music, Science & Tech on Sep 27, 2009 at 2:07 pm


(YouTube Link)

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?


Email This Post
Tweet This Post 
Share This Post on Facebook

Tags: , ,

Neat stuff from the NeatoShop:

  2. Matthew Hall
    Sep 27th, 2009 at 4:42 pm

    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

  3. MrPumpernickel
    Sep 28th, 2009 at 2:41 pm

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

  5. music
    Sep 30th, 2009 at 2:02 am

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


Keep track of the comments with Comment RSS

Don't Miss: New Stuff | Bestsellers | The Cute Store
                   Funny T-Shirts

Need a gift? Get unforgettable gifts for:
Geeks | Pranksters | Kids | Hipsters | Shutterbugs
Lijit Search
Old school? Bookmark us! RSS Feed Twitter Facebook Page