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GX7/ C800 blank floppy disks

Hi just acquired a C800 (portable version of the GX7), and wondered if anyone knew if you can still get hold of blank floppy disks to use with the integral floppy drive (SY-FD3) or if anyone had a few unwanted disks. I believe the media used are 3.5" sing…

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GX7/ C800 blank floppy disks

paulyp39

paulyp39
United Kingdom

Total Posts: 3
Joined: August 23, 2015

Hi just acquired a C800 (portable version of the GX7), and wondered if anyone knew if you can still get hold of blank floppy disks to use with the integral floppy drive (SY-FD3) or if anyone had a few unwanted disks. I believe the media used are 3.5" single sided, double density disks. Cheers Paul

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Posted on March 8, 2017 at 9:12 PM
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admin

admin
United Kingdom

Total Posts: 1055
Joined: February 2, 2014

Re: GX7/ C800 blank floppy disks

Paul,

I'm not a complete expert on this so hopefully some other Members will chime in and add to this post or correct me. I'm going to pretend I know what I'm talking about anyway and explain to the best of my belief, hope it helps.

C800 (a great instrument!) and GX7 have the SY-FD3 Digital Disk Recorder as you say. The manuals are available in the Members area, including the midi manual.

Printed version of the manual including the sales brochure is available from Blurb and all pages can be previewed. Best previewed using Firefox because you can expand to full screen.

Technics GX7 Manual

Pretty much the only place to get floppy disks for the instrument is on Ebay.

The SY-FD3 uses Technics SY-D1 disks. These are extremely rare to find and usually sell for a tidy sum, I've seen them sell for £10 each and sometimes more.

However, they are 'ordinary' 3.5 inch floppy disks, of a certain type - Single Sided Double Density Double Track - and can be of any brand. These are also very rare to find. I believe that the formatted size of them is 360k. These disks are also known as 3.5 inch 360k floppy disks, or 3.5 inch SSDD or SS/DD or MF1DD. These disks have one hole in the plastic housing.

The recorder should also work with Double Sided Double Density floppy disks. These disks also have one hole in the plastic housing. They are slightly less rare, I sometimes buy them in packs of 50 or 100 from USA. They are available on Ebay in smaller quantities, most usually used but sometimes in sealed packs. Also known as DSDD or DS/DD or MF2DD. You'll find them easily if you search for 3.5 inch 720k floppy disks. The Digital Disk Recorder should be able to format them. It might be best to format them several times before use and by doing that you'd be giving the recorder a bit of use too. if it hasn't been used much this will help to free up the mechanism. It might also benefit from using a floppy disk cleaning kit to clean the heads. These are the same disk used in Acorn and Amiga computers so you might see them listed for those but they should then be formatted in the recorder. Formatting several times should remove the traces of old formatting and files if you buy second hand ones.

When buying disks off Ebay, don't necessarily trust the listing. Not that people are being underhanded but they don't always know what they are selling. Take a good look at the photos to ensure that the disks have one hole in them and try to look for the description on the disk itself or on the packet. AND the size! Don't go buying five and a quarter inch disks by accident, the descriptions can be deceptively similar.

Sometimes it is possible to use the more usual 1.4Mb 3.5 inch floppies known as High Density floppy disks or DSHD or MF2HD. These have two holes in the plastic housing and you might have to cover the second hole to get them to work. Even then they might not work and would be the least reliable.

The slightly better news than all of the above is that the C800 and GX7 have MIDI capabilities. Even though they aren't General Midi as far as I can tell, they still have good facilities so my recommendation would be to get a good quality midi interface and use a computer sequencer for recording and playback with GX7.

Hope that helps,
Mike

Posted on March 8, 2017 at 10:58 PM

paulyp39

paulyp39
United Kingdom

Total Posts: 3
Joined: August 23, 2015

Re: GX7/ C800 blank floppy disks

Mike,

Thank you for the very comprehensive answer. Following your advice I have found an old DS DD disk at work which I have been able to format in the C800 drive. All is working as expected which was a major surprise seeming the instrument is over 28 years old. I've found 10 new DS DD disks on eBay which should do the job. My future plans are to find a donor GX7 which may be dismantled for spares, hopefully keeping my C800 going for a number of years. Many thanks for your help.

Paul

Posted on March 9, 2017 at 7:47 PM