Amiga external floppy drive hooked to a PC?

[Ral-Clan]

The Commodore 64 people have done it, by developing several cables that allow one to hook a datasette or a 1541 to a PC....(X1541, XE1541 cables, etc.)

So shouldn't it be possible to hook an external Amiga drive to a PC and finally allow a PC to read Amiga 880K disks?

Okay....I think I'm going to answer my own question here: the 1541 had its own controller CPU in it (6502) and was a "smart" drive.  The Amiga external drives are "dumb" drives controlled by the Amiga's Paula chip....perhaps that's why it's not possible.

But couldn't "smart" software be written that emulates Paula or something on the PC side to control the external drive?

Heck, real Amiga external floppy drive control could even be added to UAE, just like VICE can actually load and save to a real 1541 connected to your PC.

[save2600]

Have you heard of the Catweasel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Computers_Catweasel

[tone007]

Catweasel!

I bet someone could work out an adapter.

[Ral-Clan]

Have you heard of the Catweasel?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Computers_Catweasel

Yes I have, but I was wondering why this can't be done in software...(controlling an external Amiga drive hooked to the PC's parallel or USB port).  The Catweasel is nice, but it's costly and not widely available.  Thousands of people have 1541 drives hooked to their PCs because the cable is so easy to make and the software is open source.

[MskoDestny]

Yes I have, but I was wondering why this can't be done in software...(controlling an external Amiga drive hooked to the PC's parallel or USB port).  The Catweasel is nice, but it's costly and not widely available.  Thousands of people have 1541 drives hooked to their PCs because the cable is so easy to make and the software is open source.

You need to sample the data pin at a fairly precise interval which is difficult to do on a mutli-tasking computer without a RTOS. There's actually a piece of DOS software that will give you read-only access to Amiga floppies through the parallel port, but it would be difficult to get it to work well on any modern desktop OS. You might be able to do it by writing a device driver that hooks a timer interrupt at the appropriate frequency.

I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to build an adapter with a cheap USB microcontroller.

[tone007]

Demand for such a thing probably isn't nearly as high as it is in 8-bit land as the Amiga is a more capable machine and can do disk imaging and things like that itself fairly well without depending on a PC.

edit: though I guess for running floppy-based games directly in WinUAE it could be cool...