using Amiga Floppy drives?
 

Can AmigaForever running in Windows access a real Amiga floppy drive? I have both internal and external Amiga drives. Is there a way to connect them via a USB?

Afraid not, no :sad

only with https://www.vesalia.de/e_catweaselmk4.htm i suppose

Nope. Sure you can read ADF files from it, but you can't have a virtual Amiga access it in realtime - which I think is what the post is about.

mmm It would seem the catweasel is not available. Has anyone tried https://github.com/RobSmithDev/ArduinoFloppyDiskReader. I just need to get the data off the floppies into a usb stick, SD card, or a PC (Linux/Windows) hard drive. I have an arduino so this just might be a solution?

Dual drive PC reading of amiga floppy
 

See this link for some other options to get data to a PC from an amiga floppy.

https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-118

Build yourself a Greaseweazle. https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle

Or buy a Kryoflux, or Supercard Pro.

To be clear though, there is no device, (that I know of anyhow) that will let WinUAE etc let you access an Amiga floppy disk in real time.

All the above will let you create an image of an Amiga disk, and use that image with the emulator.

It does surprise me, considering the incredible popularity of the Amiga platform, that a cheap solution has not been created yet. It could be that almost all software has been captured already. It is now just your old data files that is an issue.

I know that Stephen Jones (of Aros and Checkmate case fame) had something
running called Icaros. The interesting part of this was they had direct access to the disk drive and was even able to boot original disks direct, the amiga emulator had no clue it was real/not real so it worked!

But the achillees heel here is the Catweasel! finding one, the second-hand value of it etc.

I know we are all on new formats, but this is that last mile that would make Amiga emulation, a real experience for me. I am surprised we dont have that yet as an affordable solution.

It's not really a case of being affordable though, is it, it's a case of practical and or useful.

Floppy disks are about the worst medium there is to store data, and the rate at which they're dying is incredible.