ADF/IPF reading/writing on a PC?

cappuchok · 27 June 2006, 13:04

I've tried networking my vanilla Amiga 1200 (Escom) to my PC without success (a fried serial port doesn't help a lot...) and would like to back up and restore my Amiga disks.

I have been investigating the possibility of using USB drives (for both reading and writing) since my main PC is legacy free (i.e. it doesn't have a regular floppy drive).

My current USB drive is one similar to this. It seems to be even more limited than a regular old PC FDC (USB floppies really should be more flexible, but this particular one apparently isn't). Yet the manufacturer claims that the drive is able to read all formatted disks (but doesn't specify what "all" means), but it isn't even able to read/write a regular 800 KB Mac disk.

My best hope seems to be a drive using this controller, but I have yet to find a readily available drive that does. According to what I've read, drives using this controller should be cheaper than the regular "standard FDC bridged to USB" variety.

And no, a Catweasel isn't an option because A) it's a very rare and expensive piece of kit over here, and B) my relatively small collection of disks isn't worth it. And C) it's possibly not capable of reading/writing IPF images.

Any advice, drive models using the controller mentioned above, software to read the disks and related information would be helpful.

fryguy · 27 June 2006, 15:24

The best option is probably to get a network card, check cnet.device and 3c589 on Aminet for supported cards. Another option is to use a laplink-cable with Pc2Am.

fiath · 27 June 2006, 15:57

Well, USB floppies *used* to be just as bad as PC floppy controllers, since they stuck a regular generic PC FDC and interfaced it to a USB controller - no wonder they were expensive. However, it does seem like the situation is changing, and I have heard of firmware-driven USB floppy drives which can (in theory) be programmed for other disk formats (Note though that I think you couldn't do it with an off-the-shelf version, you had to source from the manufacturer), giving low level access to the floppy drive. We have been in touch with one manufacturer who were very helpful in providing information about their hardware - I'll have to dig out that info... because my memory on this is a bit hazy.

Of course, if these babies live up to the hype, then IPF writing could, at last, be possible. And would save us the huge amount of work designing hardware ourselves - which would have been expensive for people to build anyway - even if people were prepared to do that.

About Mac 800KB disks - I'm not really surprised, these will be pretty hard to read by any hardware but the "real deal" due to the variable-angular velocity technique used.

cappuchok · 28 June 2006, 18:17

About the controller, that sounds very much like the one I posted above (it has some memory which can be used to store and run custom programs within the controller). Problem is, I have yet to find an actual USB floppy drive that uses this controller and is available in regular computer retail stores.

I have an oldworld Mac which can read and write 800 KB Mac disks, perhaps it would also be able to read/write Amiga disks?

cappuchok · 30 June 2006, 18:08

As for network cards, my Amiga is a semi-working vanilla A1200 and my disk collection is fairly small, so I'm not buying equipment I won't need for my other machines, all of which already have built-in network cards (including the laptops, so, no need for any PC-card).

It seems, at the moment, that my best bet is the Mac (which, before anyone asks, can run a modern Linux just fine), or one of those firmware-driven floppies which don't seem to exist yet (or at least it's not known which manufacturers use those new shiny USB floppy controllers).

If anyone can dig up a list of manufacturers which use the above firmware-driven controller (by SMSC) and prefferably one which includes the 32KB custom program memory component (described in the specifications as "optional", so all manufacturers may not use it) it'd be a good way to start searching for suitable hardware.

fiath · 07 July 2006, 18:41

Agreed! I'll keep an eye out certainly. It would be great to finally solve this stupid situation!

As for reading Amiga disks on an old world Mac - I don't think so. I think (though I could be completely wrong) it uses a *similar* FDC and format as the PC, it is just it changes the drive speed to fit the extra 80kB on.

cappuchok · 08 July 2006, 17:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by fiath

Agreed! I'll keep an eye out certainly. It would be great to finally solve this stupid situation!

As for reading Amiga disks on an old world Mac - I don't think so. I think (though I could be completely wrong) it uses a *similar* FDC and format as the PC, it is just it changes the drive speed to fit the extra 80kB on.

When formatting a DD disk in the Mac, the drive changes speed several times, so you could be right. On the other hand, I've seen "reports" on the net of people actually having had success in reading Amiga disks on oldworld Macs, but no details on how, or of which program was being used. My guess is it involves Linux, though, as Mac OS Classic seems to be largely devoid of useful programs for these rather technical tasks.

As my collection of game disks is fairly small (and mostly harddisk-installable games which came on regular AmigaDOS disks, anyway) I am mostly just looking for a way to read, image and restore regular AmigaDOS disks (ADF images), not to image those tricky-to-read formats that IPF handles, but if the first task requires a drive that is also capable of the second task, all the better, and if it will also allow restoring IPF images, then perhaps I'll be able to try out some games from Dream17 on the real thing...

Maybe SMSC has a list of manufacturers that use this controller? I'm guessing this is the chip manufacturer you were talking about earlier, as no other manufacturer I've seen mentions that their FDC's are programmable.

fiath · 10 July 2006, 14:23

If people could read Amiga disks, that kinda makes we think the FDC in old macs was very different to the NEC765-derived one. Unfortunately, I don't have time to look into that right now.

I'm not sure what company it was, I will have to dig out the emails...

cappuchok · 05 September 2006, 18:31

So far, BUSlink is the only company I've found that is said to be using the 97CFDC programmable floppy controller chip (USB1, it seems). There is a newer (USB2) model of that chip called 97CFDC2 which I can only presume is even more flexible (and yes, it's still programmable).

More information on the BUSlink device here: http://www.applefritter.com/node/18587
Note that it's using the older model chip, so I'm not sure how useful, if at all, it would be.

If I understand this correctly, the ultimate floppy drive would be using this chipset (97CFDC2) in combination with one of the drives used by Commodore in the original (pre-Escom) Amiga models? As the BUSlink device looks like a standard 3,5" enclosure (none of these slimline laptop drives here, no sir!), making such a combo wouldn't even require contracting a manufacturer, you could just use the drive from a real Amiga and hook it up via this enclosure to your PC or Mac. That is, I hope you could. It'd certainly make it a lot easier for people to dump their old Amiga disks on modern hardware.

Jope · 06 September 2006, 06:33

The real Amiga drive is not needed here, the only thing that's important is the controller's flexibility..

Zetr0 · 06 September 2006, 08:49

as a small thought, why not invest say £15 on a CF to PCMCIA adapter and a small 512MB CF card... this way one could easly use the amiga to ADF direct from the floppy to the CF card (pre-formatted for fat16/32) to plug straight onto the PC.

The bonus of using this method is that you can for a further small investment of about £5 use the CF card as an amiga harddrive... and i just love the performance gain of a solid state hard.

ikorodu · 06 September 2006, 10:01

Hi,

You can read amiga floppies in a standard PC floppy drive and create ADF's from them. You need two Floppy drives connected to the same cable in your PC and this software:

adfread 1.0 (31.03.2006)
========================

Adfread will allow you to create ADF floppy disk images from regular
Amiga disks using standard PC hardware. It uses same method as Disk2FDI
but is compatible with Windows 2000 and newer.

Requirements:

- Windows 2000/XP/2003
- BIOS support for 2 floppy drives
- 2 non-USB floppy drives installed on the same cable
- Regular format Amiga disks without any copy-protection
- A normal PC-formatted 1.44M floppy[Download adfread]

Will this solve your problem? All you will need to get is a standard floppy drive (or two) for your PC, whcih cost aroun £6 each.

ikorodu

cappuchok · 06 September 2006, 17:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zetr0

as a small thought, why not invest say £15 on a CF to PCMCIA adapter and a small 512MB CF card... this way one could easly use the amiga to ADF direct from the floppy to the CF card (pre-formatted for fat16/32) to plug straight onto the PC.

The bonus of using this method is that you can for a further small investment of about £5 use the CF card as an amiga harddrive... and i just love the performance gain of a solid state hard.

That'd be good if I only needed to image standard AmigaDOS disks, but I also have non-DOS disks that need to be imaged to IPF, my Amiga is an Escom Magic Pack and thus doesn't have the required hardware (a real Amiga drive and a good FDC) nor am I comfortable with soldering inside the computer. So my best option is a PC drive which will let me read and image any floppy format including AmigaDOS and various custom game formats.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ikorodu

You can read amiga floppies in a standard PC floppy drive and create ADF's from them. You need two Floppy drives connected to the same cable in your PC and this software:

adfread 1.0 (31.03.2006)
========================

Adfread will allow you to create ADF floppy disk images from regular
Amiga disks using standard PC hardware. It uses same method as Disk2FDI
but is compatible with Windows 2000 and newer.

Requirements:

- Windows 2000/XP/2003
- BIOS support for 2 floppy drives
- 2 non-USB floppy drives installed on the same cable
- Regular format Amiga disks without any copy-protection
- A normal PC-formatted 1.44M floppy[Download adfread]

Will this solve your problem? All you will need to get is a standard floppy drive (or two) for your PC, whcih cost aroun £6 each.

My PC is "legacy free", hence my need for a capable USB solution. Prefferrably one that would work equally well as a standard PC/Mac/Linux floppy drive but with the added advantage of having a programmable "software FDC" that could be made to emulate (under Linux, Windows or Mac OS) basically any 3,5" controller used in various old computers. Of course it also takes a very good floppy drive hardware to complement the software FDC in order to read any and all 3,5" formats.

BippyM · 06 September 2006, 18:03

afaik you can only Image game disks on a real amiga!

PC drivesd simply cannot handle the amiga formats and there is no way one can create an IPF raw file with one!

Best bet is to get hold of a cheap a1200 or an a1200 mobo and floppy

cappuchok · 06 September 2006, 18:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by bippym

afaik you can only Image game disks on a real amiga!

PC drivesd simply cannot handle the amiga formats and there is no way one can create an IPF raw file with one!

Best bet is to get hold of a cheap a1200 or an a1200 mobo and floppy

The SPS people think it's possible given the right hardware (as outlined in my posts above), and I think, if it's possible, it's the best option because it would streamline the process by eliminating the need to transfer the dumps from one computer to another.

Duke · 06 September 2006, 18:57

The right hardware is here: http://amiga.think42.com/news/news99_e.htm

Sadly, the software is missing.

ikorodu · 06 September 2006, 19:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by cappuchok

My PC is "legacy free", hence my need for a capable USB solution. Prefferrably one that would work equally well as a standard PC/Mac/Linux floppy drive but with the added advantage of having a programmable "software FDC" that could be made to emulate (under Linux, Windows or Mac OS) basically any 3,5" controller used in various old computers. Of course it also takes a very good floppy drive hardware to complement the software FDC in order to read any and all 3,5" formats.

I should have read your original post better! sorry!

ikorodu

cappuchok · 02 October 2006, 18:54

Ironically, it seems NEC's USB floppies use the programmable FDC I mentioned earlier in this thread. Although, it is from what I can understand the earlier revision (USB97CFDC) which I am not sure is as capable as the USB97CFDC2, and coupled with a standard NEC drive mechanism I'm not at all sure it can handle custom formats...

Although if the actual drive could be exchanged, it might be an interesting option.

Zetr0 · 03 October 2006, 01:09

would not a parallel version be any good?> there were some old school parallel FDD's and CDROMS i have a couple here.. but to be honest there more legacy than the standard internal ones and getting it to work on XP without drivers,.... well ... nuff said about that...

hmmm

If you are interested i might have a small solution... i have a 1d4 board that got damaged while in storage and now no longer fires up... after a brief test i believe the primary video chip is damaged i will test it again.. if your interested just PM me

gizmomelb · 03 October 2006, 05:45

this USB floppy drive/card reader has the USB floppy control chip mentioned:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...MCF7AR&cat=RDM

27 June 2006, 13:04	#1
cappuchok Registered User Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Sweden Posts: 13	ADF/IPF reading/writing on a PC? I've tried networking my vanilla Amiga 1200 (Escom) to my PC without success (a fried serial port doesn't help a lot...) and would like to back up and restore my Amiga disks. I have been investigating the possibility of using USB drives (for both reading and writing) since my main PC is legacy free (i.e. it doesn't have a regular floppy drive). My current USB drive is one similar to this. It seems to be even more limited than a regular old PC FDC (USB floppies really should be more flexible, but this particular one apparently isn't). Yet the manufacturer claims that the drive is able to read all formatted disks (but doesn't specify what "all" means), but it isn't even able to read/write a regular 800 KB Mac disk. My best hope seems to be a drive using this controller, but I have yet to find a readily available drive that does. According to what I've read, drives using this controller should be cheaper than the regular "standard FDC bridged to USB" variety. And no, a Catweasel isn't an option because A) it's a very rare and expensive piece of kit over here, and B) my relatively small collection of disks isn't worth it. And C) it's possibly not capable of reading/writing IPF images. Any advice, drive models using the controller mentioned above, software to read the disks and related information would be helpful.

27 June 2006, 15:57	#3
fiath Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: South East / UK Age: 46 Posts: 1,930	Well, USB floppies used to be just as bad as PC floppy controllers, since they stuck a regular generic PC FDC and interfaced it to a USB controller - no wonder they were expensive. However, it does seem like the situation is changing, and I have heard of firmware-driven USB floppy drives which can (in theory) be programmed for other disk formats (Note though that I think you couldn't do it with an off-the-shelf version, you had to source from the manufacturer), giving low level access to the floppy drive. We have been in touch with one manufacturer who were very helpful in providing information about their hardware - I'll have to dig out that info... because my memory on this is a bit hazy. Of course, if these babies live up to the hype, then IPF writing could, at last, be possible. And would save us the huge amount of work designing hardware ourselves - which would have been expensive for people to build anyway - even if people were prepared to do that. About Mac 800KB disks - I'm not really surprised, these will be pretty hard to read by any hardware but the "real deal" due to the variable-angular velocity technique used. Last edited by fiath; 27 June 2006 at 16:05.

06 September 2006, 10:01	#12
ikorodu Registered User Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Newark / UK Posts: 108	adfread Hi, You can read amiga floppies in a standard PC floppy drive and create ADF's from them. You need two Floppy drives connected to the same cable in your PC and this software: adfread 1.0 (31.03.2006) ======================== Adfread will allow you to create ADF floppy disk images from regular Amiga disks using standard PC hardware. It uses same method as Disk2FDI but is compatible with Windows 2000 and newer. Requirements: - Windows 2000/XP/2003 - BIOS support for 2 floppy drives - 2 non-USB floppy drives installed on the same cable - Regular format Amiga disks without any copy-protection - A normal PC-formatted 1.44M floppy[Download adfread] Will this solve your problem? All you will need to get is a standard floppy drive (or two) for your PC, whcih cost aroun £6 each. ikorodu

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27 June 2006, 15:24	#2
fryguy Registered User Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Skarabörg, Sweden Age: 44 Posts: 1,020	The best option is probably to get a network card, check cnet.device and 3c589 on Aminet for supported cards. Another option is to use a laplink-cable with Pc2Am.

28 June 2006, 18:17	#4
cappuchok Registered User Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Sweden Posts: 13	About the controller, that sounds very much like the one I posted above (it has some memory which can be used to store and run custom programs within the controller). Problem is, I have yet to find an actual USB floppy drive that uses this controller and is available in regular computer retail stores. I have an oldworld Mac which can read and write 800 KB Mac disks, perhaps it would also be able to read/write Amiga disks?

30 June 2006, 18:08	#5
cappuchok Registered User Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Sweden Posts: 13	As for network cards, my Amiga is a semi-working vanilla A1200 and my disk collection is fairly small, so I'm not buying equipment I won't need for my other machines, all of which already have built-in network cards (including the laptops, so, no need for any PC-card). It seems, at the moment, that my best bet is the Mac (which, before anyone asks, can run a modern Linux just fine), or one of those firmware-driven floppies which don't seem to exist yet (or at least it's not known which manufacturers use those new shiny USB floppy controllers). If anyone can dig up a list of manufacturers which use the above firmware-driven controller (by SMSC) and prefferably one which includes the 32KB custom program memory component (described in the specifications as "optional", so all manufacturers may not use it) it'd be a good way to start searching for suitable hardware.

07 July 2006, 18:41	#6
fiath Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: South East / UK Age: 46 Posts: 1,930	Agreed! I'll keep an eye out certainly. It would be great to finally solve this stupid situation! As for reading Amiga disks on an old world Mac - I don't think so. I think (though I could be completely wrong) it uses a similar FDC and format as the PC, it is just it changes the drive speed to fit the extra 80kB on.

10 July 2006, 14:23	#8
fiath Moderator Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: South East / UK Age: 46 Posts: 1,930	If people could read Amiga disks, that kinda makes we think the FDC in old macs was very different to the NEC765-derived one. Unfortunately, I don't have time to look into that right now. I'm not sure what company it was, I will have to dig out the emails...

05 September 2006, 18:31	#9
cappuchok Registered User Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Sweden Posts: 13	So far, BUSlink is the only company I've found that is said to be using the 97CFDC programmable floppy controller chip (USB1, it seems). There is a newer (USB2) model of that chip called 97CFDC2 which I can only presume is even more flexible (and yes, it's still programmable). More information on the BUSlink device here: http://www.applefritter.com/node/18587 Note that it's using the older model chip, so I'm not sure how useful, if at all, it would be. If I understand this correctly, the ultimate floppy drive would be using this chipset (97CFDC2) in combination with one of the drives used by Commodore in the original (pre-Escom) Amiga models? As the BUSlink device looks like a standard 3,5" enclosure (none of these slimline laptop drives here, no sir!), making such a combo wouldn't even require contracting a manufacturer, you could just use the drive from a real Amiga and hook it up via this enclosure to your PC or Mac. That is, I hope you could. It'd certainly make it a lot easier for people to dump their old Amiga disks on modern hardware.

06 September 2006, 06:33	#10
Jope - Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Helsinki / Finland Age: 43 Posts: 9,864	The real Amiga drive is not needed here, the only thing that's important is the controller's flexibility..

06 September 2006, 08:49	#11
Zetr0 Ya' like it Retr0? Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: United Kingdom Age: 49 Posts: 9,768	as a small thought, why not invest say £15 on a CF to PCMCIA adapter and a small 512MB CF card... this way one could easly use the amiga to ADF direct from the floppy to the CF card (pre-formatted for fat16/32) to plug straight onto the PC. The bonus of using this method is that you can for a further small investment of about £5 use the CF card as an amiga harddrive... and i just love the performance gain of a solid state hard.

06 September 2006, 18:03	#14
BippyM Global Moderator Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Derby, UK Age: 48 Posts: 9,355	afaik you can only Image game disks on a real amiga! PC drivesd simply cannot handle the amiga formats and there is no way one can create an IPF raw file with one! Best bet is to get hold of a cheap a1200 or an a1200 mobo and floppy

06 September 2006, 18:57	#16
Duke HOL-Team Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Germany Age: 43 Posts: 520	The right hardware is here: http://amiga.think42.com/news/news99_e.htm Sadly, the software is missing.

02 October 2006, 18:54	#18
cappuchok Registered User Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Sweden Posts: 13	Ironically, it seems NEC's USB floppies use the programmable FDC I mentioned earlier in this thread. Although, it is from what I can understand the earlier revision (USB97CFDC) which I am not sure is as capable as the USB97CFDC2, and coupled with a standard NEC drive mechanism I'm not at all sure it can handle custom formats... Although if the actual drive could be exchanged, it might be an interesting option.

03 October 2006, 01:09	#19
Zetr0 Ya' like it Retr0? Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: United Kingdom Age: 49 Posts: 9,768	would not a parallel version be any good?> there were some old school parallel FDD's and CDROMS i have a couple here.. but to be honest there more legacy than the standard internal ones and getting it to work on XP without drivers,.... well ... nuff said about that... hmmm If you are interested i might have a small solution... i have a 1d4 board that got damaged while in storage and now no longer fires up... after a brief test i believe the primary video chip is damaged i will test it again.. if your interested just PM me

03 October 2006, 05:45	#20
gizmomelb Registered User Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: melbourne Age: 55 Posts: 541	this USB floppy drive/card reader has the USB floppy control chip mentioned: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...MCF7AR&cat=RDM

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