Idea for cheap HD floppy drives

[jlariv8957]

It's just an idea:

I would be nice to develop a driver to use those cheap USB floppy drives on Amiga with USB controller !

[Matt_H]

Not a bad idea. I'd assume that you'd only be able to use PC formats, though, so it couldn't be a high-density drop-in replacement for DF0:. Or could the drivers provide an Amiga floppy emulation in software? That'd be interesting.

The people to talk to are probably e3b, Posiedon author Chris Hodges, and individual computers.

[Doobrey]

Matt_H wrote:
I'd assume that you'd only be able to use PC formats, though,

 I guess that`s all down to the floppy controller they use, if it`s hardwired for the PC standard 720/1440 kb formats then that`s what you`re stuck with.

[odin]

What would be the use of using FFS anyway? You would need to boot into AmigaOS first to be able to use them, great for filetransfers between different computers. But a bit useless if you want to use it for unpacking ADFs to or something, you can't boot from it..

[InTheSand]

Hi,

Has anyone tried a USB floppy drive with the Poseidon stack? I would give it a go, but my Amiga and PC stuff are all packed up as I'm about to move...

 - Ali

[Dan]

I have seen reports that pc-formated disks works on usb-floppy on Pegasos so  it should work with Poseidon.

[bloodline]

More interesting would be a USB floppy drive for the PC that could read Amiga disks :-D

[jlariv8957]

Hi,

I think (but i'm not sure) that most of decoding work is
done by the host in that case, Macs are able to use them too
even if i know there are little differences between MAC
and PC disk formats. if the host machine is doing the job
why amiga couldn't ? I know it'll be impossible to boot from
that kind of disk but does anyone really use floppy disks
to boot nowadays ? if you want to play old games no need for
high density disks.

Even if it is just possible to read/write PCs disks, i think
"REAL" HD floppy should be abble to read them too !

Near the only use of floppies is to transfer files to another
machine  

[x56h34]

Just give us more Kywalda boot adapters (Jens, start producing these again! ;-)) for the ability to boot from cheap PC floppy drives. IMHO, this is the best solution, plus if you need high density feature, you simply hook it up to a Catweasel controller and off you go! :-)

[X-ray]

I agree with Toecutter. I am still looking for a spare floppy that I can put in my A4000T, preferably HD and definitely bootable. They seem to be very expensive, or wrong size.
Bring back the Kylwalda!

[Matt_H]

But a bit useless if you want to use it for unpacking ADFs to or something, you can't boot from it..

I was going on the assumption that the driver package would be downloaded to the FlashROM in the Algor, theoretically making it bootable.

I agree that it doesn't have much use otherwise, especially since it seems Poseidon already can use USB floppy drives. Could someone verify this on classic hardware?

[jlariv8957]

Should be a great idea to read amiga disks in PC for UAE !
 

[Zac67]

I guess as long as the USB stack supports generic mass storage devices an USB floppy should work without problems.
However, as those drives have a built in disk controller, they're most probably dedicated to PC format - low level that is, so reading/writing Amiga HD format would be impossible.. I'm pretty sure they don't care about the high level format (=file system), so mounting it with FFS should be no trouble.
(Mac and PC share the same low level format on HD floppy, just the file system is different.)

[Dan]

Anybody remmember this ?

[Dan]

And on the other track:
1,44MB FFS-format, didn´t we have that with the LS-120?
How is it useful?