Can I use my External Amiga Floppy Drive with Windows

Hello

I have an old external amiga floppy that has perched on top of a cupboard for many years gathering dust, is there any way that I can use this drive in conjunction with an emulator to load the orignal amiga games and demos that I have?

Thanks

Alex

[Zetr0]

Hello xanoxate,

Welcome to the EAB, i am sure you will like it here...

unfortunately there is only one way (that i know of) that allows you connect an amiga floppy disk drive to a pc, and this is by investing in an item of hardware known as a Catweasle Mk 4.

you can get them here www.amigakit.com there are a couple-o threads on here as to how to set these devices up to work properly as the origial drivers had *ahem* a few issues... but saying that i believe that the new drivers reduce and negate most if not all these other issues...

There exists a *hack* that works at best 50% of the time and hardly at all for non-dos disks... and this is available from aminet www.aminet.org

the problem with the amiga disk drive and pc disk drives is essential down to the hardware floppy disk controller on the PC since it is (cheap) limmited it can only address the device in a specific manner and wont allow it to be used any other way...

there is some discussion about some new floppy devices that are usb and thus programmable in nature, so we shall see more about that soon me thinks...

there exists two other methods....

1. buy a Compact Flash card and PCMCIA adapter

this method uses the original amiga floppy disk and a program called "disk 2 adf" or something similar... it is available from aminet (see link above) all this does is copy the entire disk structure (including non-dos disks like demos) and set them in a file known as an ADF (amiga disk format) of arround 980KB.

you can then store these adf files onto the CF card once full or complete you can then take the cf card (with an appropriate reader) will be able to load these adf files as you would disks in an emulator such as WinUAE.

2. Using a network for your amiga and PC..

On ebay from time to time you can get hold of network cards or even paralell network. wither of these methods is ok, the former being some what faster. both can be difficult to set up theres lots of help here in these forums on how to do either an the folk here are a good bunch and love to help.

essentiall this methods creates ADF files on the amiga side and then transfers them to the PC via the network and hence boot them back up in the emulator of your choice

[alexh]

Even with a catweasel I dont think you can use original games as they are copyprotected. The disks have to be copies to work. Demos should be ok.

The thing is you'll find every single disk you own has already been converted and is much easier just to download off the net.