Amiga Floppys on PC

[Naeem]

short answer no.

as far as I can see.

See its not the OS.  Its the disk controller in the bloomin PC spec disk drive.

Apparently if you find a PC disk drive from the beginning of time that might work, but then you would need to find an alternative OS to work with it in the right way.

anyone else found any other experience?


There was once upon a time a catweasel device for PC's.  This is way way way too rare to find these days.  An din most cases will have a market value > than your Amiga anyway :-)

[Naeem]

Your google still cant find the catweasel for PC.

[Naeem]

from
http://www.jschoenfeld.com/products/catweasel_e.htm

looks like its not an option, how many PC's still have ISA slots anyway?


Catweasel ISA version (PC, Alpha AXP)
The ISA version of the Catweasel is shipped with MS-DOS (TM) software. Writing to disks is only possible under Linux at the moment. The drivers are not designed to be easy-to-use. Instead, they are tools "for-freaks-only". You can read disk images from the formats listed above, and single files can be copied from Amiga, PC and C-64 disks. Drivers for the Alpha AXP are only available under Linux.
The ISA Catweasel only needs I/O address space, it does not need any DMA or IRQ channel. This way, a maximum level of compatibility is given. Accessing the Catweasel drives with a drive letter is not possible.

[Naeem]

I had come across the AF thing before...

    * The Disk2FDI software by Vincent Joguin, combined with a second floppy drive. This software works with the most common floppy disk controllers used in industry standard PCs, requiring no custom hardware other than an inexpensive additional PC floppy drive. This is a read-only solution, and currently only supports Windows 95, 98 and Me (not NT, 2000, XP or Server 2003). Disk2FDI is included in Amiga Forever.
    * The "Catweasel" floppy controller, by Individual Computers, which is available both as a PCI and as an ISA board (to be mounted inside the PC) to which the disk drive can be connected. The Catweasel is also available for the Amiga, but the one needed here is the PC version. This is a read/write solution which supports all versions of Windows except for Windows NT 4.0 (Windows 95 is supported via DOS software, newer versions of Windows are supported via WDM drivers).
    * The "Amiga Floppy Reader" (AFR), designed by Marco Veneri, is an interface which can connect an external Amiga floppy disk to the PC's parallel port. This is a read-only solution with DOS-only software.

Seems nothing will let you get proper (RW) access to amiga floppies.  The way I managed it is to put PC floppies ni my Amiga rather than vice versa.  Then it is just a matter of crossdos.

If anyone does find a reasonably priced PCI catweasel I would be most interested.

[Naeem]

cool!

I shall keep an eye out for these on ebay.  For that kind of price though you can pick up an amiga + network card.

Might be cheaper to go that route :-)

[Naeem]

yeah I found that one already.

completely overlooked the PCI version when I first checked the
catweasel manufacturers site a few months back.

they should have their products ordered by recency. :-)


The first link on there is about the old catweasel.

Anyways still too expensive I think.

Networking.  The way forward.  Amige Explorer yada yada yada.