Various versions of the Greaseweazle adapter have been around for a long time. It's a floppy drive interface similar to the Kryoflux I've owned for years. It's original idea was to read and write Amiga floppy disks on a PC.
V4 of the Greaseweazle has seen a lot of development. It can not read and write multiple disk formats across a lot more formats and systems. It also has a new ability, directly supported by WinUAE, you can boot and load Amiga disk directly in WinUAE!
The best news however is the price. Just £20.99.
You can order one here:
https://www.retropassion.co.uk/product/greaseweazle/
Here's the official information:
Greaseweazle v4 allows versatile floppy drive control over USB. By extracting the raw flux transitions from a drive, any disk format can be captured and analyzed – PC, Amiga, Amstrad, PDP-11, musical instruments, industrial equipment, and more. The Greaseweazle also supports writing to floppy disks, from a range of image file formats including those commonly used for online preservation (ADF, IPF, DSK, IMG, HFE, …).
Greaseweazle V4 is the latest version, updated for mass production and with the following features:
- Reads and writes 3″, 3.5″, 5.25″, 8″ disks (with suitable drive and cable)
- Buffered outputs, for communicating with older 5.25″ and 8″ disk drives
- Integrated power connector for directly powering most 3.5″ disk drives
- Write-enable jumper can be removed for safer preservation of precious vintage disks
- Supports flippy-modded 5.25″ drives
- Supports Disk-Change detection as used by Rob Smith’s integration into the WinUAE Amiga emulator
- 3 user-definable outputs (eg. 8″ interface REDWC signal)
- 100% factory tested, and tested again by me before shipping
More information and documentation on the wiki page
This listing is for the Greaseweazle V4 device only. To use it you will require:
- A disk drive (for example a PC 3.5″ or 5.25″ drive)
- A floppy ribbon cable (typically you want a standard PC cable with ‘twist’ on pins 10-16, to communicate with a PC floppy drive)
- Floppy drive power cable, or power supply
This is built by Zero Flux Development.
It has even been mentioned on Tom’s Hardware:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ra...l-floppy-disks
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I considered one of these a while back H, but magnetic media is fast becoming a thing of the past & if you can find any new media, it's always a rip off price & has no guarantee because of it's age.
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Using it to use disks on a daily basis isn't really the main point of it though. It's more for archival of existing disks for preservation. That's what I use my Kryoflux for.
But I'm considering one of these because they are so cheap as I can mount it inside my emulation PC with a floppy drive installed for a nice solution to archiving the ton of disks I still have to go through.
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It's far harder to create disk images on a real Amiga. The Greaseweazle and Kryoflux both make low level disk images so don't need to even read the disk format. This means you can backup and image any disk and its contents with be preserved, even if there are read errors or, as with many games, exotic disk formats that normal OSs can't read.
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Indeed and it's still such a great utility. But that only creates disk to disk copies, not rom files. These hardware solutions go much further because they create direct copies at the low level magnetic data level, so it doesn't care what format the disk is or how the data is written. It literally just makes an image of the data as held on the disk surface. So is the perfect archival solution.
This is now important now then ever. More and more original floppy disks are failing. They only ever had a life expectancy of 20 years max. Many are now 40 years old and it amazed me how many are still readable.
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