Short article to report a famous and always very useful program capable of emulating a floppy disk drive on the Windows computer (also Windows 10) . As we have all noticed, modern computers are not equipped with floppy drives because they are believed to be obsolete and no longer used also because they are supplanted by USB sticks.
However, even if now less and less often, the lack of the floppy disk reader is felt when some software requires it or when, especially in school environments, we want to exchange documents with people who use older computers and are used to working with diskettes.
Furthermore, not all users and not all companies own modern computers and there are some old operating systems or software programs that require a floppy drive for some of their functions.
Well, just as it is possible to emulate, that is, create a virtual cd player, it is also possible to create a virtual floppy disk player that works even if there is no physical floppy disk in the pc.
1) Virtual Floppy Drive is the free program that provides a virtual floppy disk.
It is used to mount floppy images in order to read any floppy disk as if it were a normal file archive.
I remember that a disk image is a single file that contains within it the exact copy of what is present inside a disk, be it a hard disk, a CD / DVD or, indeed, a floppy disk.
Virtual Floppy Drive is probably one of the most popular tools to emulate a floppy drive, it is a portable software compatible with Windows 10, Windows 8 and Windows 7 (it should also be fine with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003).
The program installs a virtual driver that makes the floppy disk reader appear in the management of the peripherals of the computer.
The user can access the contents of the image of a floppy, both from the command line and from the graphical interface.
You can also emulate one or two floppy drives of different types, for example 160KB (5.25 ") and 2.88 Mb (3.5") media.
2) Another similar and alternative program to use a Floppy Disk on Windows 10 and on PCs without a reader is Virtual Disk ImDisk
which allows you to reserve a part of RAM to create virtual disks from Floppy, CD and DVD images.
3) Magic ISO Maker, in the free version, allows you to create disk images up to 300 MB and is perfect for creating images on virtual floppy disks.
4) PowerISO is similar and supports image files for floppy disks such as BIF, FLP, DSK, BFI, BWI, BIN, IMG.
It is understood that if we are given a floppy disk, without having the reader, obviously, this cannot be physically opened and read.
The article is useful only in case the image of the floppy is saved to keep it in memory and use it later without having to copy it to a real floppy disk.
