As we all look across a sea of lifeless, nearly identically-styled consumer goods, a few of us have become nostalgic for a time when products like stereo equipment, phones, appliances, homes, cars, and furniture didn’t all look indistinguishable. Computers suffered a similar fate, with nearly everything designed to be flat and minimalist with very little character. To be sure there are plenty of retro computing projects to recapture nostalgia, but to get useful modern hardware in a fun retro-themed case check out this desktop build from [Mar] that hides a few unique extras.
The PC itself is a modern build with an up-to-date operating system, but hidden in a 386-era case with early-90s styling. The real gem of this build though is the floppy disk drive, which looks unaltered on the surface. But its core functionality has been removed and in its place an Arduino sits, looking for NFC devices. The floppy disks similarly had NFC tags installed so that when they interact with the Arduino, it can send a command to the computer to launch a corresponding game. To the user it looks as though the game loads from a floppy disk, much like it would have in the 90s albeit with much more speed and much less noise.
Modern industrial design is something that we’ve generally bemoaned as of late, and it’s great to see some of us rebelling by building unique machines like this, not to mention repurposing hardware like floppy drives for fun new uses (which [Mar] has also open-sourced on a GitHub page). It’s not the first build to toss modern hardware in a cool PC case from days of yore, either. This Hot Wheels desktop is one of our favorites.
It would be nice it the authors here would at least read or watch their source material before generating an article. The tags don’t send any command. They just contain an ID that is read by the chip reader and associated to a command executed by the control program.
Yes, that is how they work.
The article doesn’t say the tags send a command; it says the Arduino sends a command when it reads a tag
As soon as it says NFC I move on, you could hole punch a sheet in the floppy door and read it with LED.
You could OCR the label.
All of these seem like an excuse to make something with NFC.
Yes it’s basically being used as a barcode.
You mean it is being used for it’s most common use case? Most NFC tags are just used “as a barcode”.
I don’t understand why you’d use RFID for this when the unmodified floppy disk and drive is perfectly capable of storing enough information to launch a program. Then you can use standard media and you get the genuine sound, while still benefitting from the quicker load times.
Heck, a bar code sticker on an otherwise unmodified floppy disk and a $20 bar code scanner module could do the trick if actually reading floppies seems too daunting.
The floppies are not modified, they just have an NFC sticker on them. The drive is what they modified. It should be possible to fit an NFC reader in the drive while still keeping it functional though.
Doing both would be sweet. The NFC tags only have a few kB but that would be nice for a run command and a readme.
If it takes what looks like real floppy disks, I think I’d rather have a real floppy disk drive in my PC. (: And it’s very trivial to set up a program that reads a batch file off the disk to load the game residing on the hard disk if you want to experience simulating loading a game that would never actually fit on a flopoy in it’s installed form.
There is no auto launching of floppy disks
Despite however you guys might feel about this…. I think it is an awesome idea if you have the nfc tags linked to dosBox games and make old-school labels for the disks to conceal the nfc tag underneath to launch say dos:Doom or wolfenstine or any other old-school game that launches through emulators to directly open the game and corresponding app/game without searching for icons or folders or cmd line commands.
Especially if the drive was still functional and save always hits ” a:/saves/” so then you have your save files too for the game you want to play