(This post should have been put up in August of 2015)

I ran across an amazing piece of hardware on the internet.  It is called the Floppy Emu and is designed to connect to the floppy disk drive port of vintage Macintosh computers.  The Floppy Emu lets you store diskette images on a modern SD card and access them on your vintage Macintosh.

I won’t do a full review of this piece of hardware as I don’t think I could do it justice.  The ability to easily move disk images from the internet or my PC to my vintage Macintosh computers is the reason I bought one.

I ordered the Floppy Emu with the case, extension cable and sd card for a little over $130 on a Friday this past June.  It was shipped from southern California to Maine over the weekend and I had it on Monday afternoon.  It was simply, but well packed and fit in my small mailbox (like a small PO Box).

I opened it on the kitchen table and checked the contents of the package and found everything there.  The transparent case is laser etched and cut, and requires some assembly.  My daughter and I put it together in about half an hour, most of which was pealing the protective paper off the case parts.  If you wear glasses you’ll want them handy as things are small.  Altogether it presents a pretty little piece of hardware, with it’s clear case and several blinking lights and LCD screen.

Once it was put together, I plugged into my Macintosh SE and turned the SE on.  The Floppy Emu is powered by the Macintosh disk port and it lights up right away when I turned on the SE.  When the Macintosh is ready for a disk, you can see a list of images on the LCD of the Floppy Emu.  Using two buttons you can scroll up and down the list and a third button lets you choose an image.  When you choose an image, it is like putting a disk into the drive.

Last Update: 27-Aug-15