The Minimig is back, now with the ARM controller!

[SysAdmin]

News from elwood (amigaworld.net)

Dear customers,

The Minimig is now back online! Also the ARM controller is available again.

We thank Jakub Bednarski for his great work and for releasing his design for every Amigans.


Order your items now before it's too late. Go to our online shop. It will give you the total including shipping to your country. http://www.acube-systems.biz/shop/

We'll start to process orders the first days of January.

Happy new year to everyone!

The ACube Systems team

[Darrin]

As a long-term Minimig owner/user who also has one of the prototype ARM controllers, I highly recommend these things to gamers who want an OCS/ECS A500 experience.

While you can access HDF files without the ARM expansion, the speed difference is massive, especially with large HDF files.  Without the ARM you'll have to limit yourself to really small files (plus, the ARM makes updating much easier).

Also, buy the board with the 4MB installed.  On my setup (4MB with ARM), I have a 2GB HDF file running ClassicWB with an endless supply of games installed to play via WHDLoad.

One more tip for those unfamiliar with the design:  Don't buy the boards without the PIC unless you're also buying the ARM controller.  You must have either a PIC or the ARM board for the Minimig to work.

Here's mine installed inside a eMachines PC keyboard:

[CritAnime]

As someone who is a minimig newb how does the arm work. And what is the difference bewteen a Minimig without the ARM and one with the ARM?

[Rob]

As someone who is a minimig newb how does the arm work. And what is the difference bewteen a Minimig without the ARM and one with the ARM?

From the Acube website:

- emulates four floppy drives
- adds write support to harddrive and floppy disks
- allow increase of the CPU speed from 7.09 to 49.63 MHz with a 4kb zero waitstate cpu cache
- allows usage of long floppy file names
- allows usage of directories on the SD card
- allows unlimited number of files by directory
- support for 2 HDF files
- fast firmware boot

[Darrin]

You can write to HDF and ADF files without the ARM and have the CPU run faster than 7.09MHz (don't know what the speed limit is though)

[ChuckT]

From the Acube website:

- emulates four floppy drives
- adds write support to harddrive and floppy disks

Is that real hard drives and floppy disks or emulated hard drives and floppies?

[Darrin]

Is that real hard drives and floppy disks or emulated hard drives and floppies?

Emulated.  ADF images for the floppies and HDF images for hard drives.  There are no connections on the Minimig to attach a real floppy or hard drive.

[kedawa]

Has there been a board revision, or is the 4MB still a hack?

[alexh]

Has there been a board revision, or is the 4MB still a hack?

Still a hack. But a professional one

[bloodline]

Emulated.  ADF images for the floppies and HDF images for hard drives.  There are no connections on the Minimig to attach a real floppy or hard drive.

I was looking at the Pinout of a standard floppy drive only a few months ago, and pondering if I could write an arduino floppy drive controller... Might think think about that again if I have time :-/

[alexh]

You wanted to add a real physical floppy drive to a MiniMig? For reading Amiga formatted disks using a standard PC floppy disk drive?

[bloodline]

You wanted to add a real physical floppy drive to a MiniMig? For reading Amiga formatted disks using a standard PC floppy disk drive?

The actual drive is standard, no!?

The only difference is the controller...

Code: [Select]


Pin Name Dir Description
2 /REDWC Density Select
4 n/c Reserved
6 n/c Reserved
8 /INDEX Index
10 /MOTEA Motor Enable A
12 /DRVSB Drive Sel B
14 /DRVSA Drive Sel A
16 /MOTEB Motor Enable B
18 /DIR Direction
20 /STEP Step
22 /WDATE Write Data
24 /WGATE Floppy Write Enable
26 /TRK00 Track 0
28 /WPT Write Protect
30 /RDATA Read Data
32 /SIDE1 Head Select
34 /DSKCHG Disk Change/Ready


[cunnpole]

Can anyone recommend a power adapter for with it? The one on the acube site doesn't seem to have a UK socket option and wouldn't be very stable in an adapter.

[alexh]

The actual drive is standard, no!?

The drives are not standard.

But the variations are probably controller dependant.

Amiga floppy drives spin at half the rate of a PC floppy drive when a HD disk is inserted because Paula cannot accept the data above DD rate.

There is something about the _DC & _RDY lines (missing on most PC drives) and DS0 & DS1 being swapped too.

[bloodline]

The drives are not standard.

But the variations are probably controller dependant.

Amiga floppy drives spin at half the rate of a PC floppy drive when a HD disk is inserted because Paula cannot accept the data above DD rate.

There is something about the _DC & _RDY lines (missing on most PC drives) and DS0 & DS1 being swapped too.

Hmmm... Have to disagree here: http://pinouts.ru/Storage/InternalDisk_pinout.shtml

The connector is standard on the PC side of things, I think it would be quite simple to write a floppy controller using an ATMega328 (arduino), that could encapsulate the drive signals in simple packets sent over a standard UART... That could be used to read an write any floppy disk, including Amiga disks... Obviously one would have to control the drive and do the MFM encoding all in software... But that's how it was done on the Amiga anyway