With the missing parts finally on hand, I was able put in some quality soldering time this weekend and build a whole pile of Floppy Emus. If you’ve been waiting, then wait no longer: they’re available now on the Floppy Emu page. It was a soldering ultra-marathon, and wow, was it tedious! I’ll definitely be looking into options for having an electronics shop assemble boards in larger batches in the future. I wish there were an easy way to hand-off the programming, testing, and order fulfillment too, as those tasks are surprisingly time-consuming. Many assembly shops can do programming and testing too, but when your test routine begins with “turn on the Macintosh Plus”, the conversation doesn’t go very well.

Most of the new batch of Floppy Emus were sold within 12 hours of putting them out for sale, before I’d even had a chance to mention it here on the blog, so hopefully there will still be some left by the time you read this. In fact, the level of interest remains surprisingly high for such a niche product, and to be  honest I’m a little bewildered by it. Sure it’s a neat little gizmo, but I never would have guessed there were so many people out there with Mac SE/30’s rattling around in their closets, looking for a floppy emulation solution. Who are you people? Don’t you have anything better to do? You’re crazy! But I love you anyway.

With this batch of hardware, I’m also introducing a new variant of the Floppy Emu. For an extra $13, you can get the DB-19 floppy connector on a 36 inch extension cable, instead of having it built-in directly to the Floppy Emu board. This provides some extra flexibility for positioning the Floppy Emu where it’s convenient for you to see it and press the menu buttons. It’s similar to what you’d get with IEC’s cable, only now you can get it at the same time that you purchase the emulator.

The extension cable uses a tiny circuit board to adapt the DB-19 floppy connector to a standard IDC-20 header, then adds an IDC-20 to IDC-20 cable. Using a custom circuit board here seems a little like overkill, but I was unable to find a DB-19 shrouded header anywhere. The whole cable assembly is hand-built by me. This new extension cable Floppy Emu variant is an experiment, and I’ll be looking to see how popular it becomes, and how tedious it is to make the cables. If the experiment doesn’t go well, I’ll probably return to selling only the original variant with the built-in DB-19 floppy connector, and let IEC have the extension cable business for those who want one.