Raspberry PI as a real Amiga Floppy Drive

[mram]

Hi there,
after several years of hard work, my Amiga floppy drive stopped working leaving me in trouble... do I have to buy a new drive (but several disks are in bad condition too), buy a floppy emulator (nice but expensive for retro fun) ... or try to use my Raspberry PI other than as xbmc player?

The project is very simple as you can see and fits Amiga 500 case


The cost of interface should be very low (5 eur), so, if you have already a Raspberry PI for other staff, you can use it to substitute internal floppy drive, to have an external floppy drive (it emulate 2 drives) and to put all your game on a SD.
The interface is very easy, you just choice the disk at boot time.



if you would like to know more about this project you can find the schematic and the software here( http://amigadrive.blogspot.it/).

Hope you enjoy again Amiga as I did !

[Jope]

Nice! :-)

[amigakit.com]

That's brilliant. Very innovative use of the PI

[gulliver]

Excellent job on the interface you made!

Thank you for making it public

[seuden]

Awesome work!!

[Amiga1992]

That's just perfect! With the price of the Raspberry Pi, this makes for a much cheaper floppy emulator than previous tries, and it takes ADFs straight, no converting like on the HxC!!!!!

AWESOME work, will do this!
Do you plan on updating the software adding functionality suggested by people?

[Jeff_HxC2001]

Originally Posted by Akira

That's just perfect! With the price of the Raspberry Pi, this makes for a much cheaper floppy emulator than previous tries, and it takes ADFs straight, no converting like on the HxC!!!!!

Here the same with the linux & network support ...



Video here :
[ Show youtube player ]

It already support protected disk images ipf, dms, adf, adz, stx... (more than 60 formats directly supported... ).

The interface board is available as DIY since some years now.
All stuff to build it can be found there :
http://sourceforge.net/p/hxcfloppyem...loppyEmulator/
It can be also be bought at some places.

All the sources:
http://sourceforge.net/p/hxcfloppyem...loppyEmulator/

[Amiga1992]

There's no comparison. I like the HxC very much but this is simple, straightforward and very cheap. Even an idiot like myself can build this board and have this running, not the case with HxC.

[Jeff_HxC2001]

Originally Posted by Akira

There's no comparison. I like the HxC very much but this is simple, straightforward and very cheap. Even an idiot like myself can build this board and have this running, not the case with HxC.

What you missed is that all of this is only software, there is no hardware here : The library of the HxC can be used very easily by such solutions.

Someone else have done the same things a year ago : http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/vi...p?f=41&t=34143

[Amiga1992]

I think you are being harsh on a really nice alternate solution. Nobody is taking away any merit from the awesome HxC.

[kipper2k]

i like this too ... ipf's would be the icing on the cake. With an on screen display and IPF support i would be sold

[Jeff_HxC2001]

Originally Posted by Akira

I think you are being harsh on a really nice alternate solution. Nobody is taking away any merit from the awesome HxC.

Sorry, it's not my intention at all.
Especially because i think the Raspeberry Pi and the Beaglebone boards offer effectively a lot of new possibilities. Sure that if these boards was available 8/9 years ago, the HxC Floppy Emulator project wouldn't be the same today . In fact i am studying these solutions since some months now to make the "next generation" HxC Floppy Emulator. BTW That's why i made this video during my experimentations.
So i planned to do something very similar, maybe with an additional low cost mcu to add the variable bitstream support (the mcu is maybe not useful here : i have to study the RPI PLLs yet ).
The libhxcfe is open source and support more than 60 files format and already generate MFM/FM/GCR tracks buffer ready to be streamed . So everyone can feel free to use it in these kind of project .
Anyway if nobody is interested i will do it myself .

[kipper2k]

This would be perfect for me doing all my testing etc, i'll make a board up and release the files so people can do their own adapter boards if they want

[Jeff_HxC2001]

Originally Posted by kipper2k

i like this too ... ipf's would be the icing on the cake. With an on screen display and IPF support i would be sold

mhh nice idea ! thanks !

[Solo761]

This looks more than interesting. Especially since my RPi is more or less in my drawer .

What I'd suggest is moving ADFs/ADZs to a separate folder. As far as I figured they're to be saved in the root of SD card. It would be nice for "disks" to not be mixed with main files.

Also, what's maximum file length for disk files? I haven't seen that written anywhere.

Now only to decide from where to get power for RPi... I have model B that can draw up to 700mA :/. Although it's unclear in what condition, maybe in this setup it can't as it's not using all of it components (USB, network, video...)

[Amiga1992]

I would recommend getting a model A just for this. it's cheap anyway!

[Jeff_HxC2001]

Originally Posted by Solo761

Now only to decide from where to get power for RPi... I have model B that can draw up to 700mA :/. Although it's unclear in what condition, maybe in this setup it can't as it's not using all of it components (USB, network, video...)

I made the RPi rev B working in full operation (linux+ethernet+usb) on the 5V line of the Atari ST without apparent problem. ( [ Show youtube player ] ). The other possibility is to use a DCDC converter on the 12V power line to make the RPi 5V. This will limit the current to ~400mA on the 12V.

[kipper2k]

Originally Posted by Solo761

Now only to decide from where to get power for RPi... I have model B that can draw up to 700mA :/. Although it's unclear in what condition, maybe in this setup it can't as it's not using all of it components (USB, network, video...)

just put an ohm meter in series with the Pi and measure the amperage going through. With just the Pi being used as a slave so to speak i can't see it requiring more than 500ma

[lukassid]

I wonder if raspberry could be an accelerator?

[jimbob]

Great stuff. My pi is a bit idle, I think I'll give this a go.

Originally Posted by lukassid

I wonder if raspberry could be an accelerator?

I don't think so but someone cunning enough might be able to bridge the USB and ethernet to the amiga. Maybe even simultaneous with floppy emulation.