Connect an Amiga floppy drive to a PC

[Vars191]

Hi All
Help
There must be a way to connect an Amiga floppy drive to a PC so it works with WINAUE
Possibly some sort of interface unit?

[rkauer]

Nope.

The problem is not the floppy unit itself, but the dumb floppy controller inside the peecee.

Only way to use a real Amiga floppy is buying a Catweasel from Individual Computers (Jens Schoenfeld).

[Vars191]

That one seems to have a few problems because it tries to do everything, what I am thinking is a amiga only intelligent interface between the PC floppy controller and the floppy drive or an USB intelligent interface to floppy drive

[Vars191]

Hi All
I have just been discussing the possibility of a Amiga floppy drive on a pc with an engineer friend of mine, he said a simple interface between floppy and pc, looking at the problem I have come to the conclusion that all it needs is two dedicated processors one interfaces with the floppy drive and acts as a Amiga floppy controller and the other as a PC floppy interpreter this would give it near real time reading of the floppy and it would be able to boot from the floppy
Any one up to designing one

[cosmicfrog]

hahahahahhahahahahahah you say simple then you say 2 dedicated processors

which is it, get designing be nice to have though

[Vars191]

I would but the person that I usual use for the software is no longer available, he bought a computer shop, so I am hoping someone else will take up the project

[alexh]

You can read non copy protected Amiga disks with a standard PC floppy disk controller and two standard PC floppy disk drives.

The technique was discovered years ago.

Amiga disk in one drive, PC disk in the other drive... voila.

The first(?) software to use it was called Disk2FDI which was only for DOS/Win98. Toni Wilen later adapted the technique together with a RAW disk library for Windows 2000/XP by Simon Owen called fdrawcmd.sys to create ADFRead. Takes about 2-3 mins to convert a single 880kbyte disk.

The resulting ADF file can be used with WinUAE.

[Vars191]

Originally Posted by alexh

You can read non copy protected Amiga disks with a standard PC floppy disk controller and two standard PC floppy disk drives.

The technique was discovered years ago.

Amiga disk in one drive, PC disk in the other drive... voila.

The first(?) software to use it was called Disk2FDI which was only for DOS/Win98. Toni Wilen later adapted the technique together with a RAW disk library for Windows 2000/XP by Simon Owen called fdrawcmd.sys to create ADFRead. Takes about 2-3 mins to convert a single 880kbyte disk.

The resulting ADF file can be used with WinUAE.

It may be able to read a floppy but you cant writ one

[DJBase]

Buy a Catweasel controller and you have want you need.

[Toni Wilen]

You can read non copy protected Amiga disks with a standard PC floppy disk controller and two standard PC floppy disk drives.

Unfortunately most (all?) "modern" mainboards (~2-3 years old or newer) only support single floppy drive (second drive motor/select signal is not connected, super-io chip pin is multifunctional and generally used for other more "useful" purposes like fan control..)

Buy a Catweasel controller and you have want you need.

You don't direct boot with CW. You may not be able to write any disks either if you have Vista (some can, some don't, like me..)

Programmable USB floppy controller would be perfect solution but it really isn't that easy..

[Photon]

Originally Posted by cosmicfrog

hahahahahhahahahahahah you say simple then you say 2 dedicated processors

which is it, get designing be nice to have though

He probably means 2 microcontrollers, or two regions of an fpga with cpu gate blocks.

For me and Rave's idea, it came down to that the fpgas we wanted were much too expensive with the buffer size we wanted. We'd lose money selling it Also, USB needed some ID stuff that hindered us.

Hi, I bought an amega emulater in about 1997 from an indoor market thingy in Newcastle...it has a circet diagram and program to plug an external Amiga drive into your parralell port...I dont have the soldering skills to make it....If any one wants it and wants to make it for me (i dont mind paying for the parts) please let me know

[prowler]

Hi slacker1978,

Is it the Amiga Floppy Reader Project?

yes.....never made it though....got several old projcts on disk id love to be able to get running on my pc....my first piece of music i did on a computer...beethovens 9th...ahhh octomed....

Does anyone know of anyone who does copying?

[prowler]

What sort of copying?

[alexh]

Originally Posted by slacker1978

Does anyone know of anyone who does copying?

I'm in Didcot. PM me to arrange it and pop round with the disks one evening and I'll dump the data to a USB memory stick (or email it) for you.

sent you a pm alexh

I also need some assistance