Hard disk drives weren't common for most of the 9801's lifespan, being an expensive optional add-on instead of a necessity. Because of this, only some of the games in its library support hard drive installation and only a tiny subsection of those outright require it. Most games are designed to boot directly off the floppy disk, and many of them can ONLY be played this way, requiring the original game disks (or copies) and two functioning drives. There's ways to work around this with custom launchers or patched versions, but that's not the case for every game.

In addition, if for whatever reason you're crazy enough to use a machine with an actual physical hard drive and not a virtual one you can just pop an SD card into, you might find it easiest to move files to and from the drive using floppies.

Also, it's fun to pop them in and out of the drive and the drive makes nice clicks. Isn't that reason enough to mess with them at least a little?

Now, floppies are readable/writeable by Windows, and the PC98 does use the same FAT filesystem as English versions of DOS. Normally, that'd mean you don't have to do anything special to get files on and off the disk. However, the PC98 uses "3 mode" floppies that spin at 360 rpm instead of the standard 300 and are 1.2MB instead of the standard 1.44MB. I'm unsure of the specifics, but I believe it has something to do with legacy support for 5.25" high density drives, which spin at the same speed.

It's kind of hard to tell whether specific USB floppy drives sold online have support for 3-mode as it's not usually something that's listed in the specifications The one I'm using says it's a YD-8U10, and there's plenty of them on ebay for $10~20, but honestly, I'm prettttyyyyyy sure most do. Your call.

As for the floppy disks themselves, any old 3.5" diskettes will work. It's easy to find huge lots of used or deadstock ones online, so just order a handful.

The easiest way to get files on the disk in a recognizable format is to write a disk image to the floppy. To do this you'll want to use a simple freeware tool called Disk Image 1.3b.

Floppy Disk images come in a variety of formats such as FDI, HDM, NFD, etc. Disk Image supports most of these, but for anything it doesn't, Virtual Floppy Image Converter has you covered. Maybe you have some ROMs already. In that case, you can just open the program, select your image, and click HD -> FD to start writing to the disk.

You can dump disk images as well by hitting FD -> HD.

If you want to make a blank disk image, most emulators have a function to do so. In Neko Project, go to Emulate -> NewDisk. In Anex86, hit the "New" button next to either of the floppy drives and then hit "Blank Disk". You'll then need to load said disk and format it in DOS using the format command.

Once it's formatted, you can easily drag and drop files to and from with DiskExplorer.

Although I eventually did end up splurging on a setup to emulate an SCSI drive, there was a long period where this was my only way of playing software on my machine. I had to try a few methods of burning readable floppy disks before landing on this one, so I hope this takes some of the guesswork out of it for you.

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