I've been kicking around the idea of building a cable to connect my aging A1000 to my PC. For those familiar with the Atari 8-bit computers, I was hoping to develop a similar project to the SIO2PC cable and software: I'd like to use my PC and large hard drive as a "disk drive emulator" - serving up Amiga floppy disk images over a custom cable behaving just like a real disk drive. This would be totally transparent to the Amiga, which would see it as if it was any other disk drive connected to DF1.
One of the goals is to be able to boot my Amiga even if I didn't own a working Kickstart or Workbench disk - that way I wouldn't have to worry about disk or drive failure. Let's get a few questions out of the way first, essentially to determine which drive the cable would replace (internal or external):
1) Can the Amiga boot Kickstart or Workbench from an external drive? What about just Workbench (doing the soldered-in Kickstart ROM hack is an option if that's the only thing that requires the internal drive)
2) Are the connectors the same for the internal and external drive? Are there any documents available describing how the Amiga actually communicates with the drives?
3) Would this be of much use to anyone besides A1000 owners? Are there any other projects like this? I'm aware of things like Amiga Explorer which communicate over a null-modem cable, but those aren't transparent to the Amiga, nor could they be used to boot the Amiga.
