Floppy drive emulation / ADF image server

Hi,

I was wondering whether there are any solutions to emulate the floppy drive through an external computer/hardware adapter?
I was thinking about something similar that exists for the C64 where a PC software and a special cable can be used to use floppy images and make the C64 believe that it is reading a real floppy drive.
I was trying to find any information regarding this but came up empty.
Still, I think it would be very interesting if it would be possible to use ADF images with a real Amiga, rather then trying to find DD floppies etc..!
Is this something that is possible or something that already exists?

Many thanks for your help in advance!
best regards,
Balazs

Simply mount the ADFs from Harddisk with one of the many ADF Filehandlers from Aminet.

Thanks for the info! It sounds good, but would this work for games, where you'd normally boot from the floppy? Also, what about games where you have to swap disks?

Many thanks again!
Balazs

[Quixote]

bjavor:

...would this work for games, where you'd normally boot from the floppy?

;-) Mount the floppy .adf file from within UAE, then tell UAE to re-boot the emulated Amiga.  This is different to resetting UAE.  It should work.  Mind you, I haven't tried it myself, because none of my .adfs are games.  As for swapping disk, just tell UAE to eject one, then tell it to mount the next.  That's how I installed Workbench on UAE in the first place.

Hi,

Thanks, but I'm not talking about UAE here.
Rather I'd like to use ADF images made for UAE on a real Amiga!

My problem is that in a wave of nostalgy I've decided to buy a real Amiga. However, I'm not sure how I will find DD floppies to use with it. Also floppies are pretty unreliable in my view, so I was hoping that there would be a way to somehow store floppy images on a harddrive and make the Amiga believe they are real floppies.
I've seen that similar things exist for the C64, like 1541EMU etc, where the C64 is connected to a PC with a special cable to the parallel port of the PC. The PC then emulates a behaviour of a floppy drive wihh a specific floppy inserted. There you'd have all your floppies stored in the standard d64 files on the PC and the floppy swapping would also be taken care of by the PC side.
Now I imagine this would be more difficult with an Amiga as the floppy is not attached through a serial cable, but I find it hard to believe that I would be the only one that would find this usefull, and there are a lot of smart people out there...

At any rate, so far I haven't been able to find anything like that

Balazs

[Hardboy]

It should be possible, but also rather difficult. Have a look in the old Hardware reference manual, or some other technical information about the amiga.

[Quixote]

:-D Maybe you could divide your hard drive into 880kb partitions, and unpack your .adf files onto them.  But that's a little silly....

[alx]

However, I'm not sure how I will find DD floppies to use with it.

Cannot you just format them down? :-?

All your apps will go on hard drive fine, and there are installers availible for most games (there's a big site with all of them somewhere, but I cannot remember the link - anyone got it?)

[Ross_Geller]

If you can get the adfs onto the amiga, then unless you ended up with an amiga with an HD floppy disk drive (A4000s and Escom A1200s I think), you can use a HD floppy disk in the amiga and it will just think it's a DD disk because the amiga can't check if it's a DD or a HD, as far as the amiga is concerned they're all DD disks that you stick in... and if worst comes to worst, you can can just tape over the extra little hole on the HD disks and turn them into DD disks :-D

From what I remember, most/all amigas can boot from the external diskdrive port.  

Sitting here looking at the A4000's pin assignments for the diskdrive and parallel ports I think the parallel port has enough pins, as long as you're willing to use Busy and Paper Out and not want to have more than 1 amiga "drive"  ;-)  Otherwise, a little board may have to be made that answers the extra pins of the diskdrive...

The software shouldn't be hard, as far as I know the code for mounting and using adfs is free, so the main body of coding a person would have to do is translating the parallel port into commands to access the mounted adf and vice versa...

Once I get my own workload under control I might actually give this a go, it sounds like a good challenge :-)

[Ross_Geller]

Cannot you just format them down?

All your apps will go on hard drive fine, and there are installers availible for most games (there's a big site with all of them somewhere, but I cannot remember the link - anyone got it?)

Hmm, a degrader like WHDLoad could be a simpler solution, although that would probably first require mounting the adfs as virtual floppies (like the ones in disk/misc here), and it also relies on the disks being originals, rather than cracks (which quite a few adfs seem to be)  :-(

JST seems to be a similar deal...

Bjavor,

I've been thinking about exactly same thing as you, emulating an amiga floppydrive with a pc (or even another amiga). I've searched quite a lot on the net for something like that, but came up with nothing :-(  Unfortunately I don't think I'm skilled enough to build something like that myself either. I don't think it's THAT hard though...  I think such a thing really should support using images from the CAPS project also (www.caps-project.org). Doing a good emulation of an amiga drive is actually easier than making a good emulation of a C64 drive, since c64 drives actually contains a whole computer inside. I don't think there are any programs that emulate a c64 drive good enough, to work with demos and such.

Well, actually I haven't got the machine yet. I've just ordered it a few days ago. My bet is that it's going to be the Amiga Technologies/Escom one.

However, I've read in one of the FAQs that HD floppies require a stonger magnetic field to write to them. Or something similar, I'm not an engineer
And supposedly normal DD Amiga drives do not have this. So Even if they will think of HD floppies as DD the results are supposed to be shaky at best.

Although in this case getting the Amiga Technologies version will actually work for me, as it has a PC drive, so it should not have problems with the HD floppies...

I still think that having stuff lying around on floppies is not all that ideal...
Unfortunatelly, I'm not a programmer (at least not that good), so I will not be able to do anything about it

However I would be forever greatful to anybody who would manage to do it, if for nothing else then the challenge )

Balazs

Hmm...

I've looked at WHDLoad a bit. It sounds promising...
Thanks for pointing me to it!

Balazs

[Acill]

WHGLOAD wont work with 99% of the ADF games out there, and you need to put them on a floppy still to get it to go to a HD file for it. your best bet is to get a virtual floppy application off aminet. You can mount these as if they were actual drives with disks in them. Al you need to do is extract the ADF to one of these and it will work. Another option is to use UAE for amiga. It emlates an amiga on an amiga. Its sounds strange I know, but it works well on PPC and fast 060 type amiga. Its slow on anything other then an 060 or PPC. I tried it on my 060 and its still slow, but sort of works. On a PPC its about as fast as an A500.