Idea for Amiga floppy drive emulator

[8bitbubsy]

Okay, I know nothing about hw designs, so don't kill me

Imagine a PCB board with 4x flash chips, each 1MB!
You connect this board to the floppy drive connector of your Amiga, as well as giving it some horse power from the floppy molex...

There's an FPGA on the PCB which has a good floppy drive emu, and which fetches the flash chips and controls how many drives are connected, etc etc... Should find a solution to fetch the external floppy drive port.

Let's say we connect this internal board to the clockport, or maybe something else... Parallel? (Slow, yes)
We write a driver and app for it, so you can "flash" the chips with ADFs of your choice! Oh, and to select the drives, you hold the left AMIGA-button + caps lock + <drive number!>.. (Or something, this can be configured in the driver). And another hotkey to select how many drives, which flash to assign to what drive etc.. Hmm... Maybe use an SD card instead? The SD card is somehow getting "visible" as a drive in the Amiga OS...
Then you have 4x directories in it, which is "DRIVE0", "DRIVE1" etc.. Just drag ADFs over!! Would be a bit advanced to write this, but it can work.

Just imagine this! Would be extremely awesome... We do have WHDLoad and stuff, but sometimes booting from a floppy is necessary... And yes, we HATE floppies!

Let's call this ... hm... Moundox!
*pretends I am a big and old hardware geek like the big boys in here*



Let me know if the idea is do-able... I know we have some Amiga floppy emulators already, but they're not capable of being "used" from the AmigaOS!

Hardcore mode:
On-screen menu for doing all this... Well, that would require some hardware hacking, or softmodule implementation or something...

[coze]

Originally Posted by 8bitbubsy

Let me know if the idea is do-able... I know we have some Amiga floppy emulators already, but they're not capable of being "used" from the AmigaOS!
.

An emulator usable from amiga os is of very little use, cause most games/demos block access to OS so you won't be able to swap disks. Also inside the OS you have virtual floppy drives which does exactly what you want without any expensive hardware.

there goes your brilliant idea boooof ! hehehe

[8bitbubsy]

Originally Posted by coze

An emulator usable from amiga os is of very little use, cause most games/demos block access to OS so you won't be able to swap disks. Also inside the OS you have virtual floppy drives which does exactly what you want without any expensive hardware.

there goes your brilliant idea boooof ! hehehe

Then we need a little PCB board with four switches...

[Muzer]

Don't forget to include a speaker that perfectly mimics the sound of the Amiga FDD!

[8bitbubsy]

floppy_scream.wav
floppy_cough.wav
floppy_brrr.wav

[prowler]

Originally Posted by 8bitbubsy

floppy_scream.wav
floppy_cough.wav
floppy_brrr.wav

Great descriptions! I can almost hear them now!

[alexh]

Originally Posted by 8bitbubsy

I know we have some Amiga floppy emulators already, but they're not capable of being "used" from the AmigaOS!

It depends what you mean by 'not capable of being "used" from AmigaOS'

There are already at least 4 Floppy drive emulators.

One is a parallel port -> floppy bridge which requires a PC host to "serve" the floppy data.
One is a USB -> floppy bridge and requires a PC host to "serve" the floppy data.
Two are stand alone cards which take an SD card full of images and have an LCD screen and buttons for navigation.

All connect to the Amiga via the internal floppy disk connector.

You can boot from hard drive, then "insert" a disk into the floppy emulator and it will appear in Workbench just like a real floppy drive. You can eject and change disks.

Originally Posted by coze

Also inside the OS you have virtual floppy drives which does exactly what you want without any expensive hardware.

You can mount ADF images stored on the hard drive as virtual disks, but you cannot boot from them which is very important for ndos disks.

8bitbubsy's suggestion is not that crazy. He is suggesting a device which only stores 1 disk image. It is 100% analogous to a floppy disk. Connects via the floppy drive connector. You write ADFs to it and then reboot. Not a bad idea but loading new disks will be a pain, especially if the write speed is limited by the Amiga MFM encoding. (i.e. it only runs at 1x disk speed!). If it had a second interface as well as the floppy drive for re-programming it could work.

While it has never been made, I suggested a user interface design for standalone floppy drive emulators which significantly reduces the costs. Intended to be made to the exact form factor of an internal floppy drive the PCB would fit as a direct replacement for DF0: It would have no LCD, no navigation controls, just an eject button and SD card slot where the floppy disk would go. The disk selection would be done by a default disk image, containing a bootable Amiga program and dynamically the contents of the SD card. The program would have displayed the contents of the SD card on the TV, the Keyboard/Mouse/Joypad used to select disk image and the program would "write" to the disk to inform the hardware which disk to serve next. The idea went on to include the ability to select multiple disks to form a queue which could be switched by pressing the eject for a short time. Holding down the eject for a long time would once again select the default disk image.

It was a much nicer, and cheaper scheme than 8bitbubsy is suggesting.

[Photon]

You forgot the donkey "eee-aww" sound of r/w errors!

[Zetr0]

Zetr0 SD-FDR Recipe

1. an SD Card Socket board (like the gubbins from this for *£1.50*)


2. a micro controller like this (you can 5 of these for £5!) ATMEGA8-16PU
for USB interfacting

3. another microcontroller like this one (PIC18F4420-I/ML MICROCONTROLLER 44 pin) £5
for FDD interface

4. yet another micro controller (Pic 16f) £2 (for interfacing LCD


5. an LCD display (i prefer cool blue'y hue'y backlight) £6


now build all, program it all JOB done..... should only take about 18months from scratch with a couple of LARGE books =S

I was thinking of butchering an existing external floppy drive.... remove the mechanism, and pretty up the facia with some plastic and tactile buttons for menu, yeah... that would be nice to have this external plugged into the ext fdd device.

coolness = awesome 9.5
cost effectiveness.... incredibly low... not to mention the 18months of dev work to build it, then test it.... then write patches for games etc.....

a whole lot of low-level stuff

[alexh]

PCB + Assembly + test??

Plus I am 100% sure you would need a more powerful microcontroller with more RAM to be able to convert from ADF into an MFM stream. OR you would have to pre-process the data.

[Retro1234]

Ive got links for these two projects
http://sensi.org/~tnt23/megadrive/
http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/index.html
It looks like they even tried it with a Snes backup device
Are these projects now Dead?

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by Boo Boo

Ive got links for these two projects
http://sensi.org/~tnt23/megadrive/
http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/index.html
It looks like they even tried it with a Snes backup device
Are these projects now Dead?

Dunno about the first one, but the second one is most definitely alive, as Jeff posted almost 2 months ago a progress update (here) about it in the Cyclone20 thread... and the top of his site says "Lastly updated: 27/09/09"

I was keeping my eyes a lot on it in the past years, until I discovered WHDLoad Still it'd be a really nifty thing to have

[Zetr0]

Originally Posted by alexh

PCB + Assembly + test??

Plus I am 100% sure you would need a more powerful microcontroller with more RAM to be able to convert from ADF into an MFM stream. OR you would have to pre-process the data.

pre-process =D

I am NOTHING if not cheap =D

From the final batch og USB HxC floppy emulators, only 5 units are left.

If you want one (80€/units), contact me at:
peter (dot) sieg1 (at) gmx (dot) de

More information:
http://www.torlus.com/floppy/
http://www.torlus.com/floppy/forum/viewforum.php?f=2

Thanks,
Peter

[alexh]

Originally Posted by petersieg

If you want one (80€/units)

You're joking right? What a rip off! You could get an IDE interface for anything for less!!

Maybe some other opinion:

> Hi!
>
> Just wanted to thank you for the wonderful product! .. picked it up at
> the post office today and it's working like a charm with my old amiga
> 500 great work!!
>
> / Christoffer

Peter

[Merlin]

@ Petersieg

Holy Crap!! Is that price in Doomy Dollars, or have you been speaking to Bas***s for sales tips?

[lolafg]

@ Zetro ,

the hxc sd card seems to be a really good floppy drive emulator project by Jean François Del Nero , just a suggestion but why not think on a little production of this one ?

All the schematics are on the autor site.

I know that you must be very taken by time and other projects but really this one could be great...let us know what you think about...

thanks.

Here info : http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_...ulator_PCB.zip

[rkauer]

A brazilian guy copied the HxC design and are selling it for R$380~400 (BRL), which translates to £138 / 155EUR.

[lolafg]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

Zetr0 SD-FDR Recipe

1. an SD Card Socket board (like the gubbins from this for *£1.50*)


2. a micro controller like this (you can 5 of these for £5!) ATMEGA8-16PU
for USB interfacting

3. another microcontroller like this one (PIC18F4420-I/ML MICROCONTROLLER 44 pin) £5
for FDD interface

4. yet another micro controller (Pic 16f) £2 (for interfacing LCD


5. an LCD display (i prefer cool blue'y hue'y backlight) £6


now build all, program it all JOB done..... should only take about 18months from scratch with a couple of LARGE books =S

I was thinking of butchering an existing external floppy drive.... remove the mechanism, and pretty up the facia with some plastic and tactile buttons for menu, yeah... that would be nice to have this external plugged into the ext fdd device.

coolness = awesome 9.5
cost effectiveness.... incredibly low... not to mention the 18months of dev work to build it, then test it.... then write patches for games etc.....

a whole lot of low-level stuff

@rkauer ,

i don't know much about prices but i think this brazilian guy is keeping a lot of money for himself ?

Zetro who know much about electronical prices could tell us what could be the price of this sd hxc floppy emulator.

Reading all in Jean François Del Nero site ,i can say that the sd card can be read and write , with this product all ADF/ADZ/DMS/IPF will be playable !!

Well i really think it is a really good product.

Another link for photos and videos : http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_...y_emu_pictures