A real PC floppy drive to use with WinUAE?

[CodeHunter]

The reason I need to know if WinUAE can connect to a real PC floppy drive is this:

I can simply convert all my ADF games to floppies and use them on my Amiga.

I have noticed that WinUAE has an option that adds PC Drives at Startup.

Would this be possible at all?

Thanks!

p.s. I simply can not copy over all my adf files to my real Amiga, using the dreaded Serical PC to Amiga connection. (too slow)

[Thomas]

The PC floppy controller is not able to handle Amiga floppy disks, no matter what kind of drive is connected.

There are several hardware and one software hack available which allow to *read* Amiga floppy disks with standard PC hardware, but none to *write* them.

The only way to write Amiga floppy disks is the Catweasel controller. With this special controller you can read and write Amiga disks on a standard PC floppy drive.

http://www.ami.ga

The "Add PC drives at startup" option in WinUAE is to add the PC HDD partitions as Amiga partitions to the emulation. It does not allow low-level access to these drives.

Bye,
Thomas

[CodeHunter]

Thanks, I wish they made it for A600HD as well, the description read for A1200. Still not clear how it can read and write PC/Amiga floppies.

[amigakit]

If you have a desktop PC with WinUAE / Amiga Forever, then you can use the Catweasel MK 4.

It is a PCI card and connects to your floppy drive so you can read/write real Amiga floppy disks!

Any more questions, please get in touch!

[Tomas]

if you do not have wb2.1 or higher, then you could just transfer messydos or crossdos over to your amiga using a serial cable. Messydos/crossdos will enable your amiga to read/write 720k formatted dos floppies. You can use winace or similar to compress the adf files with.

If you do have wb2.1 or higher, then you already got crossdos.

[narcea]

Not exactly on topic but there used to be a utility (with TSR driver) for MSDOS that bypassed the floppy controller and allowed one to format, write and read custom disk capacities.

The maximum capacity depended on the psychical abilities of the disk drive.

I remember getting really excited when I formatted a 1.44MB disk to 1.9MD and then compressed it to get like 3.5MB. It wasn't very practical and I think it was kind of slow.

A quick search on goggle found "HD-COPY — Fast diskette copier and high capacity formatter." On this site: here.

I don't know if it's the same utility but I wonder if something like this could be used to write and read Amiga formatted disks on the PC?

Just a thought…


I think it was the 2M utility... Just for fun I'm formatting a disk to 880k I type this. I wonder if it'll be able to pull it off