Commodore Amiga Floppy breakthrough for all Emulation fans

the problem of being able to read commodore amiga floppy disks in modern platforms is as old as time well 1985 at least hello cave dwellers yes i'm sure many of you have come up against this without the addition of hardware sometimes quite expensive hardware to be able to read these disks in your pcs or macs you just can't retrieve or archive the contents of amiga floppy disks solutions have appeared over the years to work around this ranging from the cat weasel dating back to 1996 through to the modern low-cost boards utilizing the arduino or in the case of this grease weasel the stm32 duino another very similar board they've really helped to drive the cost down now it's one thing to use this hardware to create an amiga floppy disk image an adf file a sector bisector copy in the amiga disk file format lots of us use that in our emulators in our floppy disk emulators like our gotex it's a very common file format or some of you may also be familiar with the scp or supercard pro format that's a flux level copy it reads the raw data output from a floppy disk drive and creates an image copy protection and all rather than doing it at the per sector level and that's a great format for making sure you've captured every last bit of those floppy disks for archival purposes we know this we're able to do that with hardware like this it's an entirely different thing though being able to pop in an amiga floppy disk into a modern computer and boot it in real time in an emulator that's something i've never seen done before until today this is the work of rob smith no not the singer from the cure and he's been sending me prototypes of something rather special comprising of both the hardware and the software to achieve this the hardware started out like this it's an arduino in a box wired up to a floppy data cable and a power cable into which you'd plug a pc floppy drive the irony being that you can't use an amiga floppy drive and into the different pin assignments on them however it soon evolved into this and it arrived like this just like any other usb floppy drive no soldering no desoldering forming no screwing or unscrewing a ready to go usb floppy drive and here's how it works if we plug the drive into my windows laptop we'll hear the bing bomb of detected hardware but no new disk drive appears in my computer that's because it's detected as a com device rather than a floppy drive then we can do one of two things we can run rob's reader and writer software and on opening we can do some diagnostic checks first of all just to make sure it's all working and this will overwrite whatever floppy i put in there so just be aware of that if you try this yourself and all of those checks have passed and it says it's ready to go easy peasy all we've done is plug in a floppy drive so far and then the utility has two functions it can rip an image in adf or scp format and it can write those images back to disks so that you can load them on real hardware now this isn't its party trick but of course it's very useful to have in itself you may well have a huge box of random amiga floppy disks just like me old documents saved games tracker modules or unlabeled disks that you'd like to look through and this is a great way of doing it here i am for example ripping the game hudson hawk from a stack of disks it doesn't take more than a minute or so to rip it and it tells us all passes have checked on capturing that image we can then hop over to our amiga emulator win uae mount the adf image that we've just taken and it loads right up [Music] it's a lot of fun just going through lots of old discs and ripping them and of particular interest to me were discs like this one which is just labeled samples i was able to rip them as well as the amiga format cover disk which has pro tracker on it load that all up into an emulator and then browse someone's old collection of sound samples it feels like a lovely bit of digital archaeology being able to do this [Music] it wasn't all plain saline though this game lemmings gave me a bit of a headache trying to rip it here's the original disc we're not working for my cracked copy here and it has copy protection on the disk which is doing its job very well by denying my attempts to copy it however if we switch to the scp format to get that very low level flux reading from the disk drive it powers through the copy process and gives us an image file open it up in winui which does natively support scp files just as it does adfs and it loads right up so like i said that's not its party trick but it's very useful indeed and there are some occasions where there's just nothing you can do about these old disks because of dirt and grime and mold i say there's nothing you can do just as an aside here's a useful little 3d print that you might like it's very simple it will allow you to put a floppy disk into the mount and it will hold that floppy disk open and then you can put the 3d printed handle into the disk and spin the disk to see it and if you see any dirt or white specks of mold you can just wipe them off some people have told me isopropyl alcohol should be used others have told me gently wiping the disc with nothing more than water is what's required making sure you then leave the disc to dry before trying it if you're going to do that i would suggest distilled water because in the area where i live you'll just end up with a layer of lime scale across your disks and that won't do any good at all anyway we'll move on from cleaning floppy disks and get back to the the real party trick of this drive what is it that makes it different from other devices well let me show you what i have here is a customized compile of the win uae emulator which has been very specially changed i've already got the emulator installed so i'm just going to copy the executable across and launch with this one instead of the official one and this is available all links to do this yourself are in the video description now by using this version of the emulator we get some additional options namely if we go to the expansion screen we can then select disk controller and we can see that three devices are supported and we'll select rob's arduino reader writer because that's the one we've got today but just be aware of the other devices if you've already got one you can just download this and run it so we'll enable it we'll start the emulator and can you hear that that's the distinctive ticking of an amiga floppy drive waiting to be fed so we'll slide a disc in and just like magic it's loading an amiga floppy live into the emulator no ripping no mounting ads it's just real amiga discs it's a bit of a holy grail for us amiga emulation fans and one that people have said in the past couldn't be done especially with arduinos i've just fast forward this a bit and let the disc fully load so that you can see there it is it does actually load and rob tells me that it's pretty much the real speed of amiga floppy disk loading a little bit slower because of the emulation involved the middleware to make this work but it works nonetheless what's more you can select the drive you'd like this to be so we can set our physical drive as df1 as secondary disk drive and we can boot using an image file into workbench and using the emulator we can crank up the speed of our virtual floppy disk drive so workbench loads super quick and then we can slot real discs into the drive and explore them in a workbench on this disk for example i had a flick through and i discovered what seems to be an interesting document on it it's a list of copied software someone is willing to supply and all of the prices including some oddities such as a game called colgate a german clean your teeth game it's amazing what you find on these old floppy disks i'm hugely grateful to rob for putting this together i spent the afternoon digging through all of my disks finding out discs that had either unreadable labels unusual labels or just things that looked a bit curious that i hadn't heard of before or looked at before and certainly things that i haven't been able to find on the usual online sites where you get these adf files anything unusual anything that stood out i i loaded or i ripped and then amongst them i came across all kinds of things including yet more pirate games lists now when the developers got sick of the platform you could buy anything mostly for the price of a spare blank floppy disk and there was even one with pictures of a cpu accelerator in the prototype stage according to the caption anyway and various other bits of hardware for sale it seems like whoever put these discs together from the text was either on the inside of silica systems or knew someone in silica systems to get big discounts on the hardware it's quite funny to read looking back i also came across a red dwarf picture disc so of course i flicked through some of those pictures i found a disc called golden oldies and on there i found lots of old games like pac-man and frogger which ran far too quickly on the emulator as i had the cpu speed cranked up but it was fun to discover them anyway some of the discs were just simply unsalvageable with the basic cleaning you might be able to see on this disc here i've tried to get as close as possible that it's suffering more than just surface dirt that mottled look on the disc suggests worse forces are at play beneath the surface not just on the surface and i had no luck saving this one unfortunately of course it should go without saying that if you have some very important data files that you desperately want to get back from disks this is not a forensic method and the key in those situations is to use the disk as little as possible and to make sure it gets into the hands of an expert or you do your research to make sure you can salvage that data what this is for is for playing old games for ripping old disks if it doesn't work it doesn't work and it doesn't matter to you but if it's anything more important and than that then do adhere to best practice when it comes to forensic retrieval of your data it also works beautifully in writing onto disk to play on real hardware i had no problems with that whatsoever on my a500 plus and hopefully in time all of this work will feed into the ami barrier project so that you'll be able to plug in your usb disk drive into a raspberry pi fire up your amiga emulator read amiga disks in real time look out expo's lookout retro game stores we could go down there with our little raspberry pies and our disk drives and check those games actually work before we buy them and take them home who knows the possibilities are endless the amiga never seems to die and more and more projects like this like the pie storm we saw recently they just keep on coming it's incredible what is happening in the amiga scene and i promise we will explore some other platforms on the channel soon because we've been doing a lot of amiga stuff but that's just a reflection of the community and of the scene and of everything that's happening at the moment and this is no different huge thanks to rob for all of his hard work on this thank you for watching i hope you found this video useful and enjoyable and if so take a moment to subscribe to the channel and we'll see you again soon take care bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 120,175

Keywords: commodore amiga, winuae floppy disk, adf disk capture, scp disk capture, amiga emulation, commodore amiga floppy disks

Id: aJ0g7lQQVus

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021