Hi everybody, i've used for years the following home made circuit and works perfect, it's really cheap and easy to do:
https://retrogames.cl/sio2pc.html
Excuse if it is in spanish, but the scheme and the materials list is universal, and you can easily translate with your browser if you wish. It is a serial to SIO port converter; you can use an old PC with a DB9 serial port and Windows XP; i personally, use it with Windows 11, and the serial port is an USB 2 serial CH340 (driver install required). The main chip, is really easy to find:
https://es.aliexpress.com/i/4000696660700.html
MC1489 and LM1489 are fully compatible:
https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/LM1489.html
VID_20230310_010434.mp4
The software, is a freeware called "AspeQT":
https://sourceforge.net/projects/aspeqt/
You can emulate many disk drives using ATR or XFD images, plus, you can mount folders (with no subfolders) as disk images; plus, you can copy real disk to images and visce-versa.
My hardware, is a 65XE GS with 64K of RAM, i can play Yoomp!, His Dark Majesty, Bosconian, Break it, Arcadia, Dr. Mario, JrPacman, etc., many ports and ABBUC games, any game made for 64k machines, on floppy or executables.