Minimig+USB floppy drive question?

[freqmax]

I have digged deeply into the intrisics of "USB-floppydrives" some years ago. They are completly rigid, and can't read anything but standard PC-floppies. Unless you replace their ASIC controller chip.

Electrical wise it's possible to hack some I/O ports on the Minimig FPGA (Spartan-3 XC3S400) to act as an USB port.
Software wise it would require some serious HDL-coding better spent on fixing the blitter. And take precious space from other software code needed.

So reading Amiga floppies by any density with USB-floppydrive is a dead end. Unless you want to do some serious hardware engineering.

Amiga uses more sectors per track. Different sector gap aswell I think. And possible different sync bits. Add to that the PC floppy controllers are really braindead. So they aren't flexible enough to do any efficient reading of Amiga floppydiscs.

An easier approach is infact to just wire the RD+GND pins from the floppy to the FPGA and level convert from 5V to 3.3V! Then you can just modify the Minimig floppy code to take it's MFM input from a real device.

[freqmax]

Two quick solutions:
1) Rewire with a cable capable of connecting RD, Step, Head, etc.. Then connect this to the spare I/O of the Minimig or similar.

2) Buy an FPGA-on-USB-stick. And program it with proper code. And wire it instead of the original controller.

Pay attention to 3.3V vs 5V issues thoe.