For some games, you might have to disable caches. In Workbench 2.0 and higher, you can access "Early Startup Options" by holding both mouse buttons as you restart/boot.
amiga games are mostly written with the a500 in mind so kickstart 1.3/2.0, 68000, original agnus and 512 chip ram and 512 fast ram as this was the most common expansion for most a500 owners between 1985 and 1990.
Cinemaware, the maker of Wings, called their disks "Reels" because they fashioned their games as 'interactive movies'. It was their gimmick. Defender of the Crown was one of the ultimate store demos back in the Amiga 1000 days...
When you get a hard drive running, try whdload which is an excellent solution for old games regardless of kickstart. Relokick never did squat for me. Great shirt!!
You have the same problem as associated with the later Escom Amiga A1200; which came with a modified Panasonic PC floppy drive. I believe it is something to do with software copyright protection. I modified my Escom A1200 motherboard (simple wire) and fitted a Commodore era floppy drive, to get around this problem. I would get myself a Gotek as DF0 and a 5'1/4" faceplate, then switch the modified floppy drive to DF1. Or alternatively; fit an SCSI/IDE CD-ROM for the big gap (Connect it to an SCSI/IDE HDD/Memory Zorro card). Having access to 500+mb of data on an Amiga: is the dog's dangly bits.
I loved this episode! Awesome t-shirt! I live in Colorado and I would love to get my hands on an Amiga computer of some kind, although I’ve read that they were way more popular in Europe then they were here.
@dave4shmups Yes Amiga's where very popular here in Europe in the late 80's and early 90's because they where extremely good value for money back then.
Games probably down to your disk drive not being fully compatible. Most of them well use their own loaders and I think they can be quite fussy about hardware.
@@RetroHackShack Similarly it could be a slight incompatibility with the way you're creating disks, so I'd try disks created on the PC in the A500, then the A500 drive in the 2000 if you can!
I played Amberstar on my Amega 1200. It took me 2 years to complete the game from 2 floppy disks! These days on a PC I can complete a game on a CD in 6 months! With Microsoft dropping Windows 11 and soon Windows 12 I'm thinking of going back to playing my Amga 1200 again. Who here remembers playing Monkey Island? I loved that game too. I'm now looking at buying this PCBWay but where can I buy one ready-built?
This is way out there BUT.. did you check if those cracked games are NSTC or PAL standard? PAL games from mostly Europe required the FAT Agnus chip on my Amiga 500 to run PAL games.
Recently got myself an A500 and have been exploring solutions for this exact problem, I found Keir Fraser's GreaseWeazle to be an excellent solution as well.
"I'm getting some pretty severe flickering"... Welcome to Interlace mode! ;-) Great vid! As for the games, with 3.1, hold both mouse buttons and go into PAL mode and disable caches. It could be your 2M chip RAM too... There used to be a program called Degrader (I think) that gave you a lot of options to try to get around that... That said, once you get a hard drive, you'll use WHDLoad instead of floppies and it will take care of all of that for you. Also, it "could" be the lack of that READY signal. You might want to try the A500 floppy drive to validate that.
as far as I am aware the paula chip never got upgraded so other than the audio filter circuit being different between models (1200 - 500 is a good example) the audio should be the same. Sometimes the RCA jacks tarnish or get dry joints and can cause crackling and intermitant sound problems.
Wings somehow doesn't really benefit from an accelerator for some reason. It's my favorite Amiga game though. I completed it back then (it has something like 240 missions) and I completed the PC remake of it some years ago.
some of the amiga games have copy right protection on the disc so the PC disk drive might not be reading them right. take the floppy drive out of the 500 and try it in the 2000 for a test ??
A recap of the whole computer is recommended, and that will probably solve the sound issue, there is two filter caps for the Sound, any Amiga will start without any electrolyte caps installed, all vill boot without but there is no sound.. soo the caps are important.
that bouncing ball demo looked really slow and the kickstart also took forever to show up, are you sure you dont need the tick line for the correct speed. maybe run sysinfo to see if your amiga really runs at full speed? the amiga used the 50/60hz from the power outlet to generate the clock speed.
It might be your modified pc floppy. Escom(who bought Amiga after C= went under) put modified PC drives in their version of the A1200, and a few things wouldn't work.
I just fixed my video toaster Amiga 2000 today! But it’s not reading the hard drive. Boots off floppy. I need software! Will this method work with a usb floppy drive on a Mac running windows in parallels?
The slow sound, is this a pal or a ntsc machine? I think if you run a ntsc version of the game on a pal machine it will sound slower in some cases. If I put a ntsc agnus in my A2000 some games the music really speeds up. I think only very early games have this problem. The music on the test disk was correct so pretty sure its just software. The keyboards are indeed very expensive. I use a board that sits between on of the cia chips and let me use a usb keyboard dongle so I can use a modern wireless keyboard with it. its sold on ebay by a company named : Electronica 4U Retro Also there is the mouSTer that plugs into the DB9 port and then you can use a usb mouse or a dongle for a wireless mouse. It also accepted gamepads. If you have a full video slot on the right side next to the psu Retro fletch sells Amiga 2000 boards that with a raspberry pi zero gives u pixel perfect HDMI out. There is also the PIStorm 2K with Emu68. Its not yet ready for most old school software, but if you want a blazing fast RTG desktop experience check it out.
Thanks for the tips! The mouster will be in the next video when I get back to the Amiga. I have a different solution for HDMI that I will show and talk about why I didn't choose the video slot solution.
@@ColdRFusion Well the mod file that played on the test disk seems fine, but I will check it with mine. Defender of the crown afaik is one of the first Amiga games, I still think the hardware is fine. If some of the resistors or caps are off it will sound distorted, this sounds just slow but fine.
@@RetroHackShack Hmm, some pal games will sound faster on ntsc, like james pond, so that can not be it. But I would not worry about it to much. Changing the cap on the output is not necessary but from my experience you will get a bit more high freq.
Great video.. I recently rescued my A500 from its most current closet, and installed a PiStorm. It replaces the CPU in the Amiga with an emulator running on a raspberry pi, and provides the Amiga with a hard drive (via the sd card in the pi), a bunch of "other" (not chip) ram, and wifi networking. Definitely check that out. In case anybody forgot... Atari SUCKS! LOL
could be you got too much ram,there was a program or 70 didnt load if you had fast ram,workbench 1.3 no cache no fast ram was the go to for old games etc.pal mode ntsc make sure which your booting into.
"This is a list of wars and rebellions involving the United States of America. Currently, there are 102 wars on this list, 3 of which are ongoing" states Wiki So, 8 bit brain, find a worthy cause to support, maybe write a letter to your congressman.
Glad to see you again, and hope things in Ukraine can be normalized in short order. Keep your BS filter on eleven concerning any news from there. This video is great information for anyone supporting Amiga hardware, since that sooner or later involves software on a floppy. Arctic Retro has a great video about using a GoTek for Amiga floppy drive emulation that you might want to look at. ua-cam.com/video/2yMJXSRAXb8/v-deo.html Slimline USB floppy drives are just too handy - better than a pocket on a shirt. (Mine is unmodified!) Isn't that chip broken out to the "socket" somewhere? That would be a lot easier soldering job for those of us without a microscope.
Unfortunately, it is not broken out. That would have been a lot easier. My gotek has been ready for an Amiga for over a year. Firmware already loaded and ready to go 😊
I'm like 2m into this video and virtually everything this guy has said is wrong. The Amiga floppy format is NOTHING, not even close to being like a MSDOS disk. Amigs disks are 80 tracks, 11 sectors per track, 512 bytes, giving 880k per disk. And that's not even including some of the other formats such as GCR, or reduced bitcell where you could get even more. MSDOS 720k disks are 9 sectors/per track, use different sync marks and everything. It's like comparing and apple to an orange because they're round and about the same size. Dear God, it gets worse. Using an Arduino to control a floppy drive is mental. There's not a lot of control you need over a floppy drive to write a disk. Motor/Index/Sync/Track 0/Ready/Direction/Step and that's about it, oh and a timer. I'm pretty sure that you could write a Kernal driver to do this readily enough over the FDC interface. Also matey, you may very well have loads of 3.5" s laying around, but PC floppy drives are NOT the same as Amiga floppy drives. Most importantly, they lack the RDY signal, which is why Amiga users simply couldn't replace their floppy drives with cheap PC ones when they broke. Wow, this video was painful to watch. Now let's see how well you write Long Tracks, or reduced bitcells with your system. Good luck...
Wow, I’m like two paragraphs into this comment and pretty much everything this guy said is wrong. Our esteemed host never claimed MSDOS and Amiga formats were similar. Hence the project to control the drive. And you may be “pretty sure” you can just write a kernel driver to use the PC floppy controller, but you would be wrong. (You may not be aware, but MSDOS and Amiga formats are not the same.) And it gets worse - the Arduino is actually a perfectly cromulent solution to low-level floppy control, that bypasses the limitations of the PC FDC, and allows the payload to be sent from a common Windows PC over USB-to-serial. Watch more than 2 min of this, as painful as it might be, and I think you’ll come to realize he covers the differences accurately, the Arduino project is way better than previous solutions that required replacing the PC FDC with a new bespoke ISA card, and he even has a solution to the common configuration of a prevalent model floppy drive to expose the particular flavor of Shugart interface that Amiga systems want - in case you need to replace a broken Amiga drive with a common off-the-shelf model that is probably pre-configured for use on a PC.
@@nickwallette6201 Ah okay, you're definitely right! Using an arduino is so much easier than using the FDC interface and driver that that I released on github that can read and write the Amiga format. Although to be fair, it can't do GCR or long tracks, bitcell changes, but it was only a PoC thing anyway. Thanks for the info about MSDOS disks being different, I didn't really know that; despite being Amiga coder who wrote games and commercial copy protection. Oh God, that code I put up that can write MSDOS disks on a 1770 DFS on BBC Micro, must have just been a lucky guess. Don't you just hate it when that happens?
@@thewelder3538 So if you're that talented, then what's with the chip on your shoulder? Coming in here with all that "this guy is wrong about everything" -- even though he isn't -- and going on about how PC floppy drives are so different from Amiga floppy drives -- even though they aren't, except for the behavior of a couple of pins, which can often be changed, or at least can fairly easily be hacked. What's wrong with using an Arduino as a disk controller? How is that any different than how a lot of PC hardware works? Lots of controllers are based on a microcontroller. Even the keyboard controller is just a microcontroller. The only difference is this one's not attached to ISA / LPC. Most importantly, why do you need to go and write rude comments to the host of a video that explains how to use a project that was conceived and designed by someone else entirely? Does it make you feel smarter than everyone else to come in here guns blazing like that? I'll be straight with you. I haven't done any low-level programming of the PC FDC. I've written a file system library, but I've only recently started getting interested in what it would take to make a dedicated, standalone gadget box to write 360K/720K/1.2M/1.4M disk images straight from SD card to floppy drive, because that's less trouble than my current disk imaging solution -- a 386 with a ZIP drive. So, I'm not fully versed on what goes on between the abstracted read/write sys calls and the actual drive hardware. That's just never come up, I didn't need to know, and so I don't. My understanding is it isn't possible to get a standard PC controller to write content compatible with the Amiga DD disk format. From what I'm led to believe, it has been tried, and it doesn't work. I could very well be wrong about that. But if that's the case .... how come nobody has ever done it? There are so many one-off Linux distros out there that boot from a CD or USB drive, and are used to hack things or provide some niche functionality. If the FDC could be coaxed into writing Kickstart disks, why is there no ISO out there that does it? Why is there no MS-DOS program that writes directly to the hardware instead of using the limited DOS and BIOS calls? Why does the Catweasel exist if a software solution could've done nearly as much? If you've pulled it off using some clever workaround, hey man, my hat's off to you. That still doesn't license you to come in here any act like a jerk, but you have my respect nonetheless. I'm going to need to see a demo, or a link, or something, though. Otherwise, with that attitude, I've got no reason to believe you've broken a barrier that has vexed everyone else for 35 years, so I think I'm just going to assume you're full of wind. I am happy to be wrong about that though. That would be a fantastic thing for the Amiga community. You seem to like feeling superior, so please, make a fool of me. I would be delighted.
@@nickwallette6201 It's not a chip, maybe it came across more harshly than it should have. There's nothing technically wrong with using an arduino to do what's done on this video, it just seems a lot more trouble than is actually needed. Doesn't mean that it doesn't have advantages too, like control. In fact, if you wired it up to the motor and some other pins, you could actually do stuff like long tracks, reduce or increase the bitcell, like say a Kyroflux does. I've been very into this kinda stuff since I came across the very first weak bits protection on Sherston Software's stuff on the BBC Micro. The very first proper implementation of weak bits on a disk surface. I wrote some articles about it which are still available (with some oscilloscope reads of the fluxes). Then I got into proper exotic stuff, both creating it and cracking it. In order to do this with the PC FDC, you can do this with a system driver which Windows will load at boot time. The down side and it's a pretty big one, is that it essentially switches out the functionality of the existing FDC logic. There's a latch for doing this, but that means you can't evict the driver after load. The functionality is the functionality and that's what you end up with.
For some games, you might have to disable caches. In Workbench 2.0 and higher, you can access "Early Startup Options" by holding both mouse buttons as you restart/boot.
amiga games are mostly written with the a500 in mind so kickstart 1.3/2.0, 68000, original agnus and 512 chip ram and 512 fast ram as this was the most common expansion for most a500 owners between 1985 and 1990.
Cinemaware, the maker of Wings, called their disks "Reels" because they fashioned their games as 'interactive movies'. It was their gimmick. Defender of the Crown was one of the ultimate store demos back in the Amiga 1000 days...
I suspected as much. Thanks for confirming.
Yes, I have to get this setup for all of my Reels
I’d be tempted to add another floppy drive. Actually I’d be more than tempted if I had an A2000! Great vid.
Thanks. I am probably going to put in a gotek in the other slot.
Defender of The Crown's music play slow on Kickstart v3.1. I've tried this on my Mister. It's fine on v1.3.
Thanks
When you get a hard drive running, try whdload which is an excellent solution for old games regardless of kickstart. Relokick never did squat for me. Great shirt!!
It's on my list. Glad I'm not the only one who likes my tshirts 😃
You have the same problem as associated with the later Escom Amiga A1200; which came with a modified Panasonic PC floppy drive. I believe it is something to do with software copyright protection. I modified my Escom A1200 motherboard (simple wire) and fitted a Commodore era floppy drive, to get around this problem. I would get myself a Gotek as DF0 and a 5'1/4" faceplate, then switch the modified floppy drive to DF1. Or alternatively; fit an SCSI/IDE CD-ROM for the big gap (Connect it to an SCSI/IDE HDD/Memory Zorro card). Having access to 500+mb of data on an Amiga: is the dog's dangly bits.
That floppy drive hack is awesome! Thanx!
You're welcome!
I loved this episode! Awesome t-shirt! I live in Colorado and I would love to get my hands on an Amiga computer of some kind, although I’ve read that they were way more popular in Europe then they were here.
Thanks, man!
@dave4shmups
Yes Amiga's where very popular here in Europe in the late 80's and early 90's because they where extremely good value for money back then.
Games probably down to your disk drive not being fully compatible. Most of them well use their own loaders and I think they can be quite fussy about hardware.
Maybe I'll try the one from the A500 in it.
@@RetroHackShack Similarly it could be a slight incompatibility with the way you're creating disks, so I'd try disks created on the PC in the A500, then the A500 drive in the 2000 if you can!
I played Amberstar on my Amega 1200. It took me 2 years to complete the game from 2 floppy disks! These days on a PC I can complete a game on a CD in 6 months! With Microsoft dropping Windows 11 and soon Windows 12 I'm thinking of going back to playing my Amga 1200 again. Who here remembers playing Monkey Island? I loved that game too. I'm now looking at buying this PCBWay but where can I buy one ready-built?
This is way out there BUT.. did you check if those cracked games are NSTC or PAL standard? PAL games from mostly Europe required the FAT Agnus chip on my Amiga 500 to run PAL games.
Yeah. Next time I pull this out I'll have a look.
Recently got myself an A500 and have been exploring solutions for this exact problem, I found Keir Fraser's GreaseWeazle to be an excellent solution as well.
Thanks
Thank you and love your dog Penny. Thank you
"I'm getting some pretty severe flickering"...
Welcome to Interlace mode! ;-)
Great vid!
As for the games, with 3.1, hold both mouse buttons and go into PAL mode and disable caches.
It could be your 2M chip RAM too... There used to be a program called Degrader (I think) that gave you a lot of options to try to get around that...
That said, once you get a hard drive, you'll use WHDLoad instead of floppies and it will take care of all of that for you.
Also, it "could" be the lack of that READY signal. You might want to try the A500 floppy drive to validate that.
Thanks
as far as I am aware the paula chip never got upgraded so other than the audio filter circuit being different between models (1200 - 500 is a good example) the audio should be the same. Sometimes the RCA jacks tarnish or get dry joints and can cause crackling and intermitant sound problems.
Wings somehow doesn't really benefit from an accelerator for some reason. It's my favorite Amiga game though. I completed it back then (it has something like 240 missions) and I completed the PC remake of it some years ago.
Wings was awesome.
Awesome video
Thanks
some of the amiga games have copy right protection on the disc so the PC disk drive might not be reading them right. take the floppy drive out of the 500 and try it in the 2000 for a test ??
other thing is some games do not like the 3.1 rom and will only work with older roms
None in stock in your shop, are you going to get more made? If not, is there a PCBWAY project of it that we can order from that you get a cut of?
I'll order some more. It usually takes a month or so sign up to be notified on the product page.
@@RetroHackShack how is parts availability these days? Gotten any better?
@c1ph3rpunk yes. Not great, but better.
This is an awesome solution! Would you happen to know if there is a similar setup for the Atari ST?
I believe there is. Perhaps I can do a part 2 and show how to do that.
That would be awesome, thank you👍
The slow/fast ram settings may need tweaking. Some older games like Archon may only work with kickstart 1.2. Are you able to run Pinball Fantasies?
I will try it and see. I can certainly burn a 1.2 rom. I thought Turrican II was after that though. It works on my 500 with 1.3 but not on my 2000.
A recap of the whole computer is recommended, and that will probably solve the sound issue, there is two filter caps for the Sound, any Amiga will start without any electrolyte caps installed, all vill boot without but there is no sound.. soo the caps are important.
A nice change from saying "go use a gotec"
I like gotek drives, but I like using originals too.
that bouncing ball demo looked really slow and the kickstart also took forever to show up, are you sure you dont need the tick line for the correct speed. maybe run sysinfo to see if your amiga really runs at full speed? the amiga used the 50/60hz from the power outlet to generate the clock speed.
It might be your modified pc floppy. Escom(who bought Amiga after C= went under) put modified PC drives in their version of the A1200, and a few things wouldn't work.
I remember defender of the crown running fine on an A1000, so no need for a newer Amiga.
I just fixed my video toaster Amiga 2000 today! But it’s not reading the hard drive. Boots off floppy. I need software! Will this method work with a usb floppy drive on a Mac running windows in parallels?
Perhaps. Check the site I linked in the description. There is also a fairly active discord server.
@@RetroHackShack I ordered a Greaseweazle from Amiga-kit.
The slow sound, is this a pal or a ntsc machine? I think if you run a ntsc version of the game on a pal machine it will sound slower in some cases. If I put a ntsc agnus in my A2000 some games the music really speeds up. I think only very early games have this problem. The music on the test disk was correct so pretty sure its just software.
The keyboards are indeed very expensive. I use a board that sits between on of the cia chips and let me use a usb keyboard dongle so I can use a modern wireless keyboard with it.
its sold on ebay by a company named : Electronica 4U Retro
Also there is the mouSTer that plugs into the DB9 port and then you can use a usb mouse or a dongle for a wireless mouse. It also accepted gamepads.
If you have a full video slot on the right side next to the psu Retro fletch sells Amiga 2000 boards that with a raspberry pi zero gives u pixel perfect HDMI out.
There is also the PIStorm 2K with Emu68. Its not yet ready for most old school software, but if you want a blazing fast RTG desktop experience check it out.
Thanks for the tips! The mouster will be in the next video when I get back to the Amiga. I have a different solution for HDMI that I will show and talk about why I didn't choose the video slot solution.
Oh and this is an NTSC machine.
Maybe an audio capacitor/resistor isn’t working quite right.
@@ColdRFusion Well the mod file that played on the test disk seems fine, but I will check it with mine. Defender of the crown afaik is one of the first Amiga games, I still think the hardware is fine. If some of the resistors or caps are off it will sound distorted, this sounds just slow but fine.
@@RetroHackShack Hmm, some pal games will sound faster on ntsc, like james pond, so that can not be it. But I would not worry about it to much. Changing the cap on the output is not necessary but from my experience you will get a bit more high freq.
Great video.. I recently rescued my A500 from its most current closet, and installed a PiStorm. It replaces the CPU in the Amiga with an emulator running on a raspberry pi, and provides the Amiga with a hard drive (via the sd card in the pi), a bunch of "other" (not chip) ram, and wifi networking. Definitely check that out.
In case anybody forgot... Atari SUCKS! LOL
Yeah. That's on my list, but I really want to use that accelerator card too just because it is so rare.
@@RetroHackShack I'm excited to see that episode as well!
Hey, where are them tests of the Accelerator board with the 68060 and that Picasso II ? Hmm? C'mon!!!
Yes. I need to come back to this. Too much fun stuff to work on 😊
Where do get new floppy disk's from?
eBay
I believe the cracked games need a newer kickstart 2.0 and and 1MB ram or more. That is if you run the game under WHDLoad
So they wouldn't work on a rev 3 kickstart like I tried?
Great shirt!
Some games need different Kickstart ROMs.
0:14 was it take or it go wasteland, but raspberrypi is faster xD
I wish there was software that could do this without any adapter required.
This would've been REALLY helpful years ago, then I found Gotek.
Yeah. I have a gotek ready to go. Sometimes I like the tacticalness of physical media though.
It's like how alot of cracked games work in dosbox but dont work on original hardware.
gotek is another option.
could be you got too much ram,there was a program or 70 didnt load if you had fast ram,workbench 1.3 no cache no fast ram was the go to for old games etc.pal mode ntsc make sure which your booting into.
Thanks!
"This is a list of wars and rebellions involving the United States of America. Currently, there are 102 wars on this list, 3 of which are ongoing" states Wiki
So, 8 bit brain, find a worthy cause to support, maybe write a letter to your congressman.
Many thanks for the video, and for the support of Ukraine. Now I'm in it, and I can get a little distracted. I really like your content! Thanks again!
Thank you:
Glad to see you again, and hope things in Ukraine can be normalized in short order. Keep your BS filter on eleven concerning any news from there.
This video is great information for anyone supporting Amiga hardware, since that sooner or later involves software on a floppy.
Arctic Retro has a great video about using a GoTek for Amiga floppy drive emulation that you might want to look at.
ua-cam.com/video/2yMJXSRAXb8/v-deo.html
Slimline USB floppy drives are just too handy - better than a pocket on a shirt. (Mine is unmodified!)
Isn't that chip broken out to the "socket" somewhere? That would be a lot easier soldering job for those of us without a microscope.
Unfortunately, it is not broken out. That would have been a lot easier. My gotek has been ready for an Amiga for over a year. Firmware already loaded and ready to go 😊
What 'bad news stupor?
I'm like 2m into this video and virtually everything this guy has said is wrong. The Amiga floppy format is NOTHING, not even close to being like a MSDOS disk. Amigs disks are 80 tracks, 11 sectors per track, 512 bytes, giving 880k per disk. And that's not even including some of the other formats such as GCR, or reduced bitcell where you could get even more. MSDOS 720k disks are 9 sectors/per track, use different sync marks and everything. It's like comparing and apple to an orange because they're round and about the same size.
Dear God, it gets worse. Using an Arduino to control a floppy drive is mental. There's not a lot of control you need over a floppy drive to write a disk. Motor/Index/Sync/Track 0/Ready/Direction/Step and that's about it, oh and a timer. I'm pretty sure that you could write a Kernal driver to do this readily enough over the FDC interface.
Also matey, you may very well have loads of 3.5" s laying around, but PC floppy drives are NOT the same as Amiga floppy drives. Most importantly, they lack the RDY signal, which is why Amiga users simply couldn't replace their floppy drives with cheap PC ones when they broke.
Wow, this video was painful to watch. Now let's see how well you write Long Tracks, or reduced bitcells with your system. Good luck...
All true…
But the arduino interface solves the issue, and controls the normal pc drive to make it compatible with the Amiga formatting.
Wow, I’m like two paragraphs into this comment and pretty much everything this guy said is wrong.
Our esteemed host never claimed MSDOS and Amiga formats were similar. Hence the project to control the drive.
And you may be “pretty sure” you can just write a kernel driver to use the PC floppy controller, but you would be wrong. (You may not be aware, but MSDOS and Amiga formats are not the same.)
And it gets worse - the Arduino is actually a perfectly cromulent solution to low-level floppy control, that bypasses the limitations of the PC FDC, and allows the payload to be sent from a common Windows PC over USB-to-serial.
Watch more than 2 min of this, as painful as it might be, and I think you’ll come to realize he covers the differences accurately, the Arduino project is way better than previous solutions that required replacing the PC FDC with a new bespoke ISA card, and he even has a solution to the common configuration of a prevalent model floppy drive to expose the particular flavor of Shugart interface that Amiga systems want - in case you need to replace a broken Amiga drive with a common off-the-shelf model that is probably pre-configured for use on a PC.
@@nickwallette6201 Ah okay, you're definitely right! Using an arduino is so much easier than using the FDC interface and driver that that I released on github that can read and write the Amiga format. Although to be fair, it can't do GCR or long tracks, bitcell changes, but it was only a PoC thing anyway.
Thanks for the info about MSDOS disks being different, I didn't really know that; despite being Amiga coder who wrote games and commercial copy protection. Oh God, that code I put up that can write MSDOS disks on a 1770 DFS on BBC Micro, must have just been a lucky guess. Don't you just hate it when that happens?
@@thewelder3538 So if you're that talented, then what's with the chip on your shoulder?
Coming in here with all that "this guy is wrong about everything" -- even though he isn't -- and going on about how PC floppy drives are so different from Amiga floppy drives -- even though they aren't, except for the behavior of a couple of pins, which can often be changed, or at least can fairly easily be hacked.
What's wrong with using an Arduino as a disk controller? How is that any different than how a lot of PC hardware works? Lots of controllers are based on a microcontroller. Even the keyboard controller is just a microcontroller. The only difference is this one's not attached to ISA / LPC.
Most importantly, why do you need to go and write rude comments to the host of a video that explains how to use a project that was conceived and designed by someone else entirely? Does it make you feel smarter than everyone else to come in here guns blazing like that?
I'll be straight with you. I haven't done any low-level programming of the PC FDC. I've written a file system library, but I've only recently started getting interested in what it would take to make a dedicated, standalone gadget box to write 360K/720K/1.2M/1.4M disk images straight from SD card to floppy drive, because that's less trouble than my current disk imaging solution -- a 386 with a ZIP drive. So, I'm not fully versed on what goes on between the abstracted read/write sys calls and the actual drive hardware. That's just never come up, I didn't need to know, and so I don't.
My understanding is it isn't possible to get a standard PC controller to write content compatible with the Amiga DD disk format. From what I'm led to believe, it has been tried, and it doesn't work. I could very well be wrong about that. But if that's the case .... how come nobody has ever done it?
There are so many one-off Linux distros out there that boot from a CD or USB drive, and are used to hack things or provide some niche functionality. If the FDC could be coaxed into writing Kickstart disks, why is there no ISO out there that does it? Why is there no MS-DOS program that writes directly to the hardware instead of using the limited DOS and BIOS calls? Why does the Catweasel exist if a software solution could've done nearly as much?
If you've pulled it off using some clever workaround, hey man, my hat's off to you. That still doesn't license you to come in here any act like a jerk, but you have my respect nonetheless.
I'm going to need to see a demo, or a link, or something, though. Otherwise, with that attitude, I've got no reason to believe you've broken a barrier that has vexed everyone else for 35 years, so I think I'm just going to assume you're full of wind. I am happy to be wrong about that though. That would be a fantastic thing for the Amiga community. You seem to like feeling superior, so please, make a fool of me. I would be delighted.
@@nickwallette6201 It's not a chip, maybe it came across more harshly than it should have. There's nothing technically wrong with using an arduino to do what's done on this video, it just seems a lot more trouble than is actually needed. Doesn't mean that it doesn't have advantages too, like control. In fact, if you wired it up to the motor and some other pins, you could actually do stuff like long tracks, reduce or increase the bitcell, like say a Kyroflux does.
I've been very into this kinda stuff since I came across the very first weak bits protection on Sherston Software's stuff on the BBC Micro. The very first proper implementation of weak bits on a disk surface. I wrote some articles about it which are still available (with some oscilloscope reads of the fluxes). Then I got into proper exotic stuff, both creating it and cracking it.
In order to do this with the PC FDC, you can do this with a system driver which Windows will load at boot time. The down side and it's a pretty big one, is that it essentially switches out the functionality of the existing FDC logic. There's a latch for doing this, but that means you can't evict the driver after load. The functionality is the functionality and that's what you end up with.