Jan 06, 2026 15:27:00

'pbm2track' draws pixel art directly onto floppy disks

Floppy disks are recording media in which magnetically coated or vapor-deposited disks are placed in a protective case, but they are rarely used in modern times when HDDs and SSDs are widespread. A tool called 'pbm2track' that draws monochrome pixel art directly onto such floppy disks has been released on GitHub.

fluxfox/crates/pbm2track at main · dbalsom/fluxfox · GitHub
https://github.com/dbalsom/fluxfox/tree/main/crates/pbm2track

Developer turns floppy disks into secret black-and-white picture canvases — pbm2track 'paints' pixel art into the disk's magnetic timing diagram | Tom's Hardware
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/developer-turns-floppy-disks-into-secret-black-and-white-picture-canvases-pbm2track-paints-pixel-art-into-the-disks-magnetic-timing-diagram

Print Pixel Art To A Floppy Disk | Hackaday
https://hackaday.com/2026/01/04/print-pixel-art-to-a-floppy-disk/

In modern society, floppy disks are no longer practical as recording media, but some people may still have some romantic feelings about their form and magnetic disks. New developer dbalsom has developed a tool called 'pbm2track' that uses the floppy disk itself as a canvas to draw pixel art.

To render pixel art, pbm2track uses the magnetic disk of a floppy disk and 'track timing diagrams' as a way to check for errors.

The magnetic disk of a floppy disk is basically a flexible circular piece of plastic coated with a thin magnetic material, with data stored as tiny magnetic flux transitions. To read the magnetic disk, the drive's head detects these magnetic transitions as electrical pulses and determines their timing to reconstruct the original data bits.

A floppy disk track timing diagram visualizes the pulses arranged in time with the rotation of the magnetic disk, and was originally used to check for errors that could lead to data corruption. Below is an example of a track timing diagram found on a typical floppy disk.

pbm2track is a tool that uses the intervals between magnetic transitions on a magnetic disk as pixels, resulting in pixel art when a track timing diagram is executed. pbm2track scans an image saved in the existing

PBM format into the magnetic field itself, and draws the image with magnetic transitions as pixels.

Although pbm2track can create virtual track timing diagrams without a floppy disk, it can also write them directly to a usable floppy disk. In fact, dbalsom used pbm2track to write the following 'PBM image of a cat' to a floppy disk.

When we ran a track timing diagram on the floppy disk, the cat's shape was indeed restored as a magnetic transition.