Amiga floppy project status

[1NOM155]

kamiga,

I found magazines of the elektor "Jun 2007 - Portuguese edition" based on article "Universal USB Device - Mach 2007 - English edition"

An Universal USB Device (driver), with free code, maybe can help you on the project. If you are interested, send me an PM.

By the way have a look at this sites:
http://libusb-win32.sourceforge.net
http://gcc.gnu.org
http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=78138

[kamiga]

Hi,

1NOM155 wrote:

An Universal USB Device (driver), with free code, maybe can help you on the project.

Well, I already have direct access to all the USB-serial converter functions via FTDI's .DLL.  A guy named Pablo Bleyer created a java wrapper called jd2xx for java access to the .DLL.  It's really easy to use and pretty cool.  FTDI's documentation is superb, and I was up and running within minutes.  FTDI has libraries for multiple OS's, so I'm covered there as well.

But I'll check out those links, and thanks for posting them!

Keith

[kamiga]

da9000 wrote:
Nice work! Keep it up. Great pages too! (schems, photos, blog)

Cheers

Hey, thanks, da9000!

I've put a fair bit of working keeping the website current, making sure the latest version of wordpress is installed, backed up, customized.

I want to refresh the whole web site a little bit, and integrate the blog into the rest of the site more cleanly.

If you are interested, here's a little graphic I threw together showing my device in action:

Anatomy of a flux

It shows how the incoming flux transition (or lack of one) is processed by the project, and stored accordingly into the memory.

I thought it was neat, anyways.

Thanks

Keith

[1NOM155]

Any news?

[1NOM155]

 :bump:

[kamiga]

There hasn't been any major improvements or news since the thread was last active.

The most recent post is from 1/15 here

http://www.techtravels.org/amiga/amigablog/?p=189

I've a new 3-week old "project", although my wife would probably not describe her like that.

Thanks

[ChuckT]

My project works right now for reading low-density disks.  There are other longer term goals, but for now, it does exactly what I intended to do when I started.  Honestly, it took a lot of head-banging to get everything right.  The amount of man-hours involved was ridiculous.  Partially because I'm inexperienced with this stuff, and partially because (sufficient, up to date, fully explained) documentation/help is hard hard hard to find.

Now note (completely different issue) that PC DRIVES can't generally be used without modification as an amiga drive.  This is mainly a cable pinout/jumper issue where the amiga floppy controller (more software than hardware) is expecting certain signals in certain places.  Wrong pinouts means disk change signals don't work, and so on.  There are cable diagrams on this site, description for jumpers all over the place, etc.

What kind of documentation do you need?  I have the book by Abacus books on Amiga Dos.  What kind of documentation do you have?  Have you tried contacting any of the old Commodore staff for help?  I know where two of them are but I haven't gotten an answer to email yet.

[kamiga]

Actually, as of today, I'm pretty good as far as documentation goes.

Where were you two years ago?

I contacted some old Amiga guys a couple years ago, and they were very helpful.  None of them remembered any of the low-level critical details, but they were helpful nonetheless.

I'm going to eventually release a detailed document describing everything one needs to know to interface with amiga floppy disks.  It will end up being at least a partial compilation of existing sources, but will also include real-world observations, ways of writing embedded code to deal with the amiga floppy data, timing diagrams, and so on.

I would like a copy of Ralph Babel's Amiga Guru Book, in English, of course.  I'm not sure what's in there regarding floppy stuff, but I'd like to get my hands on it.  I sent an email to APC/TPC or whatever their name was so that maybe there will be an English reprint.

Thanks for your post.

[ChuckT]

Are there any files that can help you here?

http://www.thule.no/haynie/

[ChuckT]

I found some drivers for Chinon.  If you could identify their write/read scheme in the code, it might help.

It seems that some of the users on C-64 boards know more about the drive since the 1541 was made by the same company.

http://www.cdrom-drivers.com/companies/210.htm

If you need any information from my book, I would be glad to help you.  I'll look in it tonight and see if there is anything of help.

[ChuckT]

I have to give you credit for getting some results.

It has been 20 some years but I remember reading in the computer magazines and I can't remember which one but it was Commodore's position that the drives (Amiga to IBM) were incompatible.  I don't know what the reason was but they just kind of rebuffed us at the notion.  Maybe they wanted to be the only supplier.  I don't know.

Amikit is supposed to come out with a MK4 device that will let you read Amiga disks on an IBM.  It is supposed to come out this month but I haven't gotten an email yet.  The price is probably $120 or so.

[ChuckT]

Ok.  I found the book on the material you need and I emailed you some additional information.  I hope you can make it work.  Just check your email.

[kamiga]

The good news is that it's already working!!  It's been working for about a year.

There's a post on my blog here

http://www.techtravels.org/amiga/amigablog/?p=134

and also here

http://www.techtravels.org/amiga/amigablog/?p=183

where I created about (50) .ADF's from my disks.

I gotta get back to work and get them all scanned in.

Thanks!