The Minimig is back, now with the ARM controller!

[bloodline]

Emulated.  ADF images for the floppies and HDF images for hard drives.  There are no connections on the Minimig to attach a real floppy or hard drive.

I was looking at the Pinout of a standard floppy drive only a few months ago, and pondering if I could write an arduino floppy drive controller... Might think think about that again if I have time :-/

[bloodline]

You wanted to add a real physical floppy drive to a MiniMig? For reading Amiga formatted disks using a standard PC floppy disk drive?

The actual drive is standard, no!?

The only difference is the controller...

Code: [Select]


Pin Name Dir Description
2 /REDWC Density Select
4 n/c Reserved
6 n/c Reserved
8 /INDEX Index
10 /MOTEA Motor Enable A
12 /DRVSB Drive Sel B
14 /DRVSA Drive Sel A
16 /MOTEB Motor Enable B
18 /DIR Direction
20 /STEP Step
22 /WDATE Write Data
24 /WGATE Floppy Write Enable
26 /TRK00 Track 0
28 /WPT Write Protect
30 /RDATA Read Data
32 /SIDE1 Head Select
34 /DSKCHG Disk Change/Ready


[bloodline]

The drives are not standard.

But the variations are probably controller dependant.

Amiga floppy drives spin at half the rate of a PC floppy drive when a HD disk is inserted because Paula cannot accept the data above DD rate.

There is something about the _DC & _RDY lines (missing on most PC drives) and DS0 & DS1 being swapped too.

Hmmm... Have to disagree here: http://pinouts.ru/Storage/InternalDisk_pinout.shtml

The connector is standard on the PC side of things, I think it would be quite simple to write a floppy controller using an ATMega328 (arduino), that could encapsulate the drive signals in simple packets sent over a standard UART... That could be used to read an write any floppy disk, including Amiga disks... Obviously one would have to control the drive and do the MFM encoding all in software... But that's how it was done on the Amiga anyway

[bloodline]

Depends.  I have a chameleon64 too, but it uses a softcore CPU.  Also, unless things have changed, you'll need the docking station to use joysticks as it doesn't (didn't) recognise the C64's ports.  You can use the IR CDTV controller which is fun.

If you want maximum A500 compatibility then Minimig is best.

If you want AGA then get the FPGA arcade.

A quick look at the schematics for MiniMig 1.1 and I can see the video seems to be generated by three 4bit resistor ladder DACs (though their form is not what I'm used to).

This is fine for OCS/ECS, but AGA needs 8bit DACs... Couldn't the three 4bit DACs be replaced with a single 8bit one and simply (de)multiplex the three signals via that?

Perhaps some electronic gurus here could help me here