Printable View
That would be cool, wouldn't it? Just a USB interface which you plug a PC floppy drive into which can read Amiga disks, can't be that hard surely. It would be much cheaper than a Catweasel at £85, especially if that's the only functionality you want from it.
Anyone know anyone with the necessary skillz to design one?
Hmm.. now that is quite an interesting idea. There are quite a few in the Amiga community with skills to at least generate ideas on how it could be achieved. Zetr0 is probably the first person to get some ideas on this from.
So I've found:
Replace your Amiga floppy drive with an interface to your PC (which serves up the floppy image) (this obviously isn't what I'm talking abuot but is interesting nontheless):
http://www.torlus.com/floppy/index.php?About
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthre...t=40706&page=2
Someone else suggesting it:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=39566
Prog to use a second floppy inside a PC to read an Amiga disk (which I've tried before and it didn't work):
http://simonowen.com/fdrawcmd/
Someone apparently trying to do it...but only updates his blog once a year...:
http://www.opencircuits.com/Amiga_floppy_project
http://www.techtravels.org/
Connect Amiga floppy via Parallel port to a PC:
http://web.archive.org/web/200803032...ack2roots.org/
If someone can create an Amiga on a tiny circuit board like the Minimig, surely someone can just do a circuit board with a floppy drive interface, a USB port and an FPGA on that simply emulates the Amiga floppy drive controller?? The programmable chip would contain everything needed to read the disk in the drive and present the data through the USB to the PC.
Ah, the Amiga Floppy Reader :). I looked at that quite a few years ago and thought that one day I would build it. Perhaps now I can. Doesn't look too complicated.
Not that reliable at reading Amiga disks though, from what I've read over the years. The Catweasel continues to get new firmware updates to improve its compatibility and add new features, which is one reason it is so expensive. Plus it supports different type of floppy drive and many different system formats.
It would however still be great to have a single external drive that would just connect to a USB port and allow reading and writing of Amiga disks. It would be brilliant, but I doubt ever realised. I'm sure it would need a lot of work on the controller hardware to actually make it read and write real disks, plus I would imagine you would need PC software to access disks, when not using it through WinUAE.
I don't see why you'd need PC software to read the disk - the controller should handle that. In fact, it would just present the disk as a removable device, so the files would be available as normal for Windows.
If it's the trackdisk.device that handles the low-level hardware commands on the Amiga, you'd essentially just need to recreate this on the FPGA, along with the means of interfacing it with Windows.
Because the floppy wouldn't be using a file system that the PC recognises you would need software although this could take the form of a driver (although it would have to be able to handle OFS, FFS possibly SFS etc and all the variations thereof).
Yes, I'd expect the driver to handle the filesystem - that's what a driver's for! Maybe the driver could just interpret the filesystems oyu already have stored in your WinUAE folder - so it would be a bridge between the original FS definition files (so you wouldn't need to rewrite any of the FS's) and Windows.
I e-mailed Jens Schoenfeld, creator of the Catweasel, with an idea to put the floppy-controlling portion of the Catweasel into a simple USB interface device. He replied saying it was a good idea, but that for it to be cost-effective he'd need an order of 20,000 units before he did the design - and that although the Catweasel enjoys stable sales, it hasn't yet sold 4000 units (as a comparison).
So...if we can get 20,000 people to sign up for buying a USB adapter to read/write Amiga disks using a physical external floppy drive, it can be made...
---------- Post added at 09:02 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:47 AM ----------
btw, once I get some means of creating adf's, I'm putting my entire PD collection onto my website - much of it unavailable on the aminet. Thousands of disks!!
Aw! I would be interested in mirroring your PD collection on CA. Possibly adding any rare programs, games etc into the directories.
I also have some massive PD and ADF collections some people have sent me on CDs over the past couple of years and I still haven't had chance to go through them all to see if there is anything rare on them. One of the CD collections contains over 10,000 ADFs!
I'd love to start creating my collection now, but £90 is a bit too much just for the privelege.
There is always the much cheaper alternative of using the Cloanto utility Amiga Explorer with an Amiga connected to the PC via Null modem cable. This allows disks to be put into the Amiga drive and directly converted into ADFs over the connection directly on the PC. Using the Amiga like an external floppy drive really.
Take a look in the Private Downloads area if you are interested in this approach.
I don't have space, nor do I have any Amiga's left. It's PC-only or nothing!
There is another solution that is PC only. It requires 2 floppy drives to be installed in the PC for the software to work. Most current PC motherboards don't support 2 drives though so an older system would probably be needed. It also only works under DOS.
The software is called Disk2FDI
I'm sure I did find a newer project that updated this Disk2FDI software for Windows and better compatibility, but I can't currently find it. If I do I will post a link for you.
I have read mixed success from users with Disk2FDI. Some say it works brilliantly, while others say they can't get it to work at all. People with older systems seem to have more success though. Even as old as a 486 works.
Yes, I tried ADFRead earlier this week that uses the disk2fdi code. It reads more than half the disk successfully, but then gives read errors on some of the blocks.
Bizarrely, if I write different content to the PC floppy in the other drive, the Amiga disk read fails/succeeds in different places...
My adf archive page is now live!