Aros and iMica’s can now read/write Amiga floppy disks with PCI Catweasel MK4.

[clusteruk]

After some time tracking down a suitable developer with the skills needed to carry out this work I finally contacted Ian Gledhill in the New Year and the project for Aros based iMica’s to read and write Amiga floppy disk drives was started.

Whilst there was a bounty for this work, the hardware was not being supplied and so it never got claimed. So we supplied an iMica Atom with PCI Catweasel MK4 we brought from AmigaKit and a compatible floppy drive in February and this project is now in final testing stage.

This project source code will reside in the Aros source library for all to use and will further support the growing realisation from most Amiga users that Aros is a very viable next generation Amiga platform freely available and running on a large amount of commodity hardware.

I would like to thanks Ian Gledhill for his professional manner and skill in this project and if you would like to beta test this and own a Catweasel MK4 PCI card then please PM me or email ian at ian.gledhill (at) btinternet.com or email me at clusteruk@hotmail.com

If you have a Catweasel and this has excited you, please take the time to send a donation to Ian for all his hard work at his paypal account ian.gledhill (at) btinternet.com

Finally, there are still some tweaks to finish this but in the end you will be able to run some Amiga 68k programs and games through Janus-UAE as well as accessing the disks from Aros and Janus-UAE. I will have this on show at the Amiga show in Bletchley in June for you all to play with.

All the best

Steve Jones

http://www.clusteruk.com

[clusteruk]

Sounds good I have a Catweasel mk4 that I don't use much these days but it could be useful for accessing Amiga disk under AROS.

Are there ant plans to support the joystick ports as well as floppy access as it would be nice to be able to use them to use real Amiga joysticks for playing old Amiga games under UAE and AROS.

At moment only really pushing for the floppy bit but if popular then the owners could get that done. After all i make nothing from this work, purely did it for Aros improvement and for examples like yourself.

[clusteruk]

Now just need to execute the data on that amiga disk.

I believe this will be possible when Janus-UAE is finished, already partly there now.

[clusteruk]

No

But the app is launched on a emulated classic amiga. Windows is just used for boot.

I have no problem with people using windows for WinUAE, it keeps them interested in Amiga while Aros becomes what they want.

[clusteruk]

Ooo, interesting. Does it work transparently as DF0: (i.e., slap a real disk in the drive and UAE will boot from it), or like on other Amigas, with multidisk.device and a mountlist?

I do not think it will take long before this is possible but Janus-UAE needs finishing first, although this is almost working with existing version of janus.

[clusteruk]

Sorry to bump but thought this would interest people, will not bump again unnaturally.

Please click on this link for a slideshow of Catweasel loading and running Amiga game from Aros.

Very cool slideshow Ian.

http://www.clusteruk.com/SitePortalPage.aspx?siteid=1&did=133

Steve

[clusteruk]

Interesting stuff. Still sitting on the fence waiting to see all the options this year...as there are a number of projects in the works.

No problem, there is no rush and a lot is happening, it is a good time to be an Amigan.