Can't understand...

[kamiga]

Hey,

Thanks for the compliment.

Yeah what I'm currently creating is an external USB-attached Amiga floppy drive controller.  You'll use a standard amiga floppy drive.  There will be Windows software to copy the disks.

I use a Parallax SX microcontroller and Ramtron's FRAM for temporary storage of the track.

It's still in the beginning stages, and there is much work to be done, but you can follow my progress at the low level on the blog available in the above post(s).

kamiga

P.S. Most of the hardware stuff, aka stepping/moving the heads, and even the MFM encoding/decoding is relatively simple once you get your hands dirty.

[kamiga]

Not sure if the "Why bother?" comment was intended for me, but I'll answer it anyways.

Imagine you have 2000 amiga floppies.  And you want to create .ADF images to archive them on a CD, and also to use in various emulators.  How do you do it?

There is no easy, fast, noncommercial way of imaging the amiga floppies on the PC.

Since PC's can't read amiga floppy disks, you must create .ADF's on the amiga first, and then transfer them to the PC.  After they are on your amiga, assuming you have a HD, you have to have some way to get them to the PC.  Your only available port is the serial port (you could use parallel but this suffers the same problem), but its horribly slow.  Like 33.6kbps reliably on an A500.  Or perhaps a little better.  Also, although the amiga does a pretty good job of reading floppy disks, an external controller can do a considerably better job, spending more time, allowing for more retries, etc -- with overall allowing for slightly less strigent timing requirements, etc.  Amiga floppy drives(and the disks) are also aging, and this will produce less than perfect results.  Now imagine you can correct for this in software on a controller.

Plug-n-play USB to the PC with some GUI software, and the amiga drive on the other side.  Simply pop in disks, read them faster and more reliable than any amiga could read them, and have a bunch of ADF's ready to go.

And heck, learn a little bit about how microcontrollers and amiga floppies work in the process?  It's a win-win situation.