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burns flipper 11:27 9th October 2009
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?
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Harrison 11:47 9th October 2009
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.
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burns flipper 14:32 9th October 2009
Stephen Coates 16:03 9th October 2009
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.
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Harrison 16:53 9th October 2009
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.
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burns flipper 18:04 10th October 2009
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.
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Buleste 19:20 10th October 2009
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).
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burns flipper 14:17 11th October 2009
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.
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burns flipper 08:02 13th October 2009
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!!
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Harrison 14:18 13th October 2009
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!
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