Commodore Amiga Floppy breakthrough for all Emulation fans
Вставка
- Опубліковано 2 чер 2021
- The Commodore Amiga has always had a compatibility problem with floppy disks on other platforms, we just can't read them easily. Emulation fans are used to the ADF format and we can rip disks within the Amiga OS ourselves on real hardware or by using additional hardware on a modern PC. But ripping disks isn't the same as just popping them in the drive and running them. Thanks to the hard work of Rob Smith that gap has now been bridged.
🏆 Support RMC
Time is the most valuable thing we have. Official Cave Dwellers create a reliable monthly income that allows me to give my all to this channel. If you'd like to support this, and help me make it the very best I can then please consider using:
/ rmcretro or ko-fi.com/RMCretro
● Support the Sponsors of The Cave
MonsterJoysticks: monsterjoysticks.com/RMC
1ClickPrint: www.1clickprint.com#RMC
● Subscribe
Please take a moment to subscribe to the channel
ua-cam.com/users/rmcretro?sub_c...
● Episode Links
Find out more at: amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk
Robs Discord Server: / discord
Register your interest on the waiting list: amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/waiting
● Join me on social media
Twitter: / rmcretro
● Come and chat on the RMC chat server
Discord: / discord
●RMC Merch Shop for RMC books, posters, mugs, and a whole lot more
rmcretro.store
● RMC Podcasts
Enjoy my Podcasts with your favourite app using the links here:
Retro Tea Break - audioboom.com/channels/5001251
This Week in Retro - anchor.fm/thisweekinretro
#CommodoreAmiga #Retro #Computers - Наука та технологія
I had a tear in my eye when hearing the "tick tick" of the hungry disk drive!
Rob Smith bringing The Cure to the Amiga floppy woes!
25-ish years ago, my Amiga 1200 setup was complete, once I installed a hard drive, and found a utility to read MS-DOS formatted discs on my Amiga. I'd spend my lunch hours at college on the Internet, downloading .lha files to 720k discs to take home to my Amiga. Never thought that the reverse would be an option, or even needed.
I love solutions to things that "cannot be done"!
amiga fans still around ..... good to see bizarre but good...
"cannot be done" ie "I can't be f**ked figuring that out"
but... but it can :D
This sole invention has rekindled my interest in the Amiga...
Nice to see my tune getting an airing in its native format. Long live ProTracker. =8*)
Oooh you made the mod?
@@RMCRetro a long long time ago, but yes. That's me =8*)
Awesome! Great tune thank you
@@RMCRetro More than welcome. You've used it to show off a great bit of tech. Now I'm sat here thinking i could get my stack of disks out of the garage that have been lugged from house to house for the last 30 years! =8*)
One thing I love about RMC; the delivery is the same as presenters on Tomorrows World back in the day.
Haha that's really quite the compliment thank you
Long Live the Amiga! It will hopefully never truly die
I didn't realize there was a difficulty of actual reading Amiga floppies on a PC (I'm new to the scene). The drive mod to convert a PC to work on an Amiga only requires looking at pin 2 (density select) and pin 34 (disk change/ready) so you'd think the PC controller would have complete ability to do whatever is necessary to read that disk. Interesting that it couldn't and you need additional hardware (interface) to get it to work. I'm guessing Rob's USB floppy is just a standard USB drive he took apart and interfaced his board with. I'll have to check out his Discord server...pretty cool project.
Oh man! Hearing U4IA Cryptoburners again after so many years was a wonderful blast from the past!
What a song!
I worked with him for a couple of years as my first job after uni. I've sent him a link to this video.
Nice to hear that you enjoyed my music. Thank you all. Always makes my day.
Awesome. As Neil says distilled water on discs. Do not use any type of alcohol to clean the disks as it will eventually dissolve them.
The aesthetic of the Amiga UI has always been a bit enchanting to me.
I'm not old enough to have ever used one when they were contemporary, but I like a lot about the interface design.
My god, I remember Pro Tracker! You could rip the audio straight from the game “Flash Back” and play it in Pro Tracker. I remember my mind being blown at the time that I could see how they made the music on a, for the time, triple A game.
I love hearing about new ways to use old tech.
If you ask me a knighthood is in order.....what a marvelous piece of work by Rob Smith !!
Thanks for yet another great episode, Neil. For once one that will actually SAVE me money rather than the opposite.
A bit of information on that Colgate game (and a fun piece of bonus trivia at the end):
It's actually not German, but Danish. It was developed by Silverrock Productions (of Hugo fame). It's also not called "Colgate", but "Harald Hårdtand: Kampen om de Rene Tænder" (roughly translated "Harold Hardtooth: The Fight for Clean Teeth").
The confusion over the name likely stems from the fact that the Colgate logo takes up 50% of the menu screen and the actual title of the game is relegated to a small text string underneath.
I was employed at a later iteration of Silverrock Productions, later named ITE and finally NDS Denmark, having gone through a few buyouts and takeovers. Harald Hårdtand was one of a couple of brand deal games developed there - another one being "Guldkorn Expressen" based on a popular Danish cereal product called Guldkorn (pretty much the same as Quaker's Sugar Puffs - and in fact, Quaker later took over production before selling it off again).
A fun piece of inside trivia on the Harald Hårdtand game: The released MS-DOS port of the game could not be completed. The porting duties were handed off to a third party who apparently never finished developing the last levels of the game, but instead just increased the difficulty exponentially to make sure no-one would be any the wiser. I don't remember if a fixed version was ever released to remedy that, but I do know that it took a while before we found out. QA back then was not what it is today. :)
[Darn. I edited the message for grammar and lost the heart icon from Neil. Oh, well. Easy come, easy go. :) ]
If this does, as you say, make its way to the Raspberry Pi 𝑨𝑴𝑰𝑮𝑨 emulators, my world will be complete.
WOAH! This is freaking awesome. There are a bunch of folks in WAUG who have been asking me for this for years. I will show you video at tonight's meeting. Great job RMC!
Fancy meeting you here, AmigaBill!
Well this made me smile, a lot! It's always felt awkward swapping ADF files about whenever I've run up WinUAE, this just makes it more like the days when I owned an Amiga.
I'm reminded of the DOS program disk2fdi. Everyone said over and over you can't read an Amiga disk on a PC... It was just accepted as fact. Then disk2FDI comes out, and if you have a PC with two onboard floppy drives, you can make an image of the amiga disk on your PC. I am always impressed with those type of "It's impossible..." "Hold my Jolt cola..." moments. ;-)
Being able to directly read a legacy disk is a great step forward. I have lots of disks from a number of platforms that might have interesting things on (well, interesting to me!) but will take time & effort to image, mount in an emulator and poke about on, so the job drifts towards the bottom of the to-do iist. Not to mention that being able to use real hardware on an emulator adds to the experience enormously.
yep, lots of weird floppy formats that are difficult to work with (sewing machines, synthesisers etc.)
As I was watching I thought, ripping narrr so what. I thought, a real-time disk loader would be miles better and then.... WOW my eyes lit up. I need this in my life.
I am utterly gobsmacked! This is human ingenuity at its finest. A big round of applause to Rob Smith 👏👏👏
Not just for making this project in the first place, but in particular for making it open source, so that anyone with fewer than ten thumbs* can make it themselves.
I visited Rob Smith's website, fully expecting to only see ready-made drives selling for ££££, but instead I found all these amazing instructions on how to DIY it.
Not only is Mr. Smith devilishly clever - or so it seems - but his community spirit is of the highest level as well. Faith in Humanity is pretty much restored again 😊
* And an Arduino 😄
I recently found my old Amiga in the attic of my parents home. I'm falling in love all over again.
I had a Commodore Amiga. It was in retrospect, epic. Well done, the presenter for bringing it back to to life. Thanks. Brilliant.
The guys that made the new c64 announce that this year they are going to do an Amiga.
This drive would be cool to be used in such project.
Whoa, I need to look into that!
The new C64 is basically just a Raspberry Pi with notions so I'm not sure what that'd give you over a Pi400 done right though.
Cool
@@Yesterzine If they make an Amiga, full size, with a working keyboard and a floppy drive like this, I would rather have this Amiga than a PI400. Im sure it would cost a lot more but I would prefer that Amiga. They are probably not going to put a disk drive but if they put something like this, it would be a cool thing to have.
@@Yesterzine There is no Raspberry Pi board inside the new "The C64" computer but infact it has a main PCB board with the main IC chip and some components onboard and a small PCB board for the side USB ports and power button.Yes the machine is based around Commodore 64 Emulation and it does this so brilliant. No messing around with settings/options and it's an extremely well made product.
I expect you're wondering, where can I get one of these? These are the links you are searching for:
➊ Find out more at: amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk
➋ Chat in Robs Discord Server: discord.gg/4YfXhfDJYn
➌ Sign up to the pre-order waiting list: amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/waiting
And if you like what I do head over to patreon.com/rmcretro to become an Official Cave Dweller
Neil - RMC
When will you help me get past those vegetarian cannables?
I want one of those disc drives!
I am absolutely 100% positive that a large part of my old Amiga collection is in that box - I wrote G-LOC in the top left hand corner on a red labelled disk! it could be a coincidence, I am in the UK and copy parties were commonplace - but the handwriting, the label colours on Xcopy, cannon fodder, might and magic - it's screaming at me far more than mere similarities
Pop into my discord Johnny I can take some more pics for you tomorrow to see if we can confirm
Put the tofu on your head!
This is truly amazing - well done, Rob!
There are some incredibly bright people in the Amiga community!
Floppies on Amiga. It was $30 back then for 10 blank Kao disks here in Canada...boy did I own many. The disk ticking is a pleasure to hear as well. Fantastic and brilliant work.
OHMYGOD! The good old floppy drive clicking! 😄😍
Oh wow, that emulation takes it clear down to the level of making the new drive act like an Amiga's mechanically! Very intersting! I've always thought that tick-tock of the Amiga drive without a disk in it was really stupid and annoying, since it's the only computer standard I've known do that. And it's obviously not necessary, and I'd have to put a disk in just to make the annoyance go away!
The bit the end about checking disks before you buy them sounds like the basis for a hand held / portable Amiga project for you 😃
Your new fangled floppy disk data technology is relatively easy to retrieve compared to my cassette tape collection that I still have from my first home computer.
I have been using Amiga Explorer for years to copy adf files to my 1200 via serial. it takes about 8 minutes at a time. this is a game-changer
WITCHCRAFT! Honestly this is the most amazing solution I've seen so far for reading Amiga disks. I literally have hundreds of mysterious old floppies that need exploring. I can't wait to get my hands on one of these. Writing back to disks to play on the real hardware is a real "game changer".
That pile of floppies is pure nostalgia. Demo disks with Body Blows and Bars & Pipes coupled with pirated versions of Rick Dangerous and Cannon Fodder - plus the odd retail copy of some game :)
Excelsior! Cheers to the engineers who transform "can't be done" into a fully-functional & delivered product. Y'all make my retro-nerd world go 'round! (and you too Neil, RMC is always a highlight in my YT feed
Well thanks for the heads up. I literally just spent the last six weeks backing up several thousand Amiga disks recovered from my mums attic to my PC using a null modem cable.... FML
Fabulous bit of kit! Adding this to my want list.... I have a couple of storage boxes of disks in the loft, and many have random titles that I wrote but now have no idea what they were! This will be so much more convenient than getting one of my amigas out just for archiving. Brilliant! I get the feeling I’ll need that printed disk cleaner too......
Game changer. Amiga dev scene never fails to disappoint. Cheers Neil for the insight.
amiga games in the dorm back in the late 80s.. so much fun
I did rescue my old files with real Amiga, additional floppy drive and Gotek. Nice and easy. Writing all those things to ADF files to USB stick and then to PC.
I remember following Rob's documentation to build a prototype for using a real disk drive late last year - amazing to see how it's come along and how slick the final solution is!
Thank you, thank you and thanks again Neil for this and the genius creator of of this very special bit of kit. I have 100s of Amiga 500 discs and I haven't been able to use my Amiga for nearly 20 years as it needs a 'trash to treasure' in my own cave to get it working again. This will come in extremely handy!
This makes me cry with utter joy!
My life is complete.
More complete once I set this up.
Thanks to Rob and you for letting us know of the latest Amiga projects especially the external floppy for pc. I love your suggestion to one day having it work on a RPi...all the best and thanks again.
I just have to comment about how great that recycled wood wall looks behind you. It really looks amazing!
Thanks Taylor!
This has blown my mind ....I need one ....great vid and thanks 👍
Two videos in one week! Wow, thanks Neil! :D
Wow wow WOW! This is fantastic work, Amiga will never die!
Rob's waiting list has now been joined. Thanks Neil for another excellent video explaining with the perfect level of detail, you got my Amiga juices all flowing!
Great stuff! I'm so happy to see peeps still creating cool stuff for the Amigas 👍🏻👍🏻
That's absolutely great! I mean, no question, my favorite is playing on the original hardware. But to have the opportunity to quickly get disk images of your old disks or write adf's to a real disk are fantastic!
Greetings, Doc64!
All hail Rob Smith!
Format exchanges have always been a terror. I did one of the first net friendly proofs of concepts when I was 22, in 1991 I took a scan I did of a furry pic called Harem Tigress, colorized it on a Mac IIcx, rendered it in 24 bit, then used a dithering app to take it down to 8 bit, and uploaded it to the Scratching Post BBS. Long distance charges for a 9600 Baud modem came to almost $20 since anything other than 20 miles away was long distance. It took almost 45 minutes.
Very useful device, even for people like me who are not interested in emulators. I've been using a version of this for some time for writing ADFs to disks for use with my amiga. Extremely handy.
Big shout out to Rob, genius, respect. I have disks that say samples on the cover.
Really awesome bit of kit. Great work by Rob!
Great stuff! I can think of a lot of potential projects with that drive as a main component!
Fantastic effort, appreciate your hard work sir.
9:22 That would be a screen grab of the Red Dwarf episode called "Parallel Universe" from 1988. In this screen grab the crew are performing a song called "Tongue Tied" sung by Danny John-Jules (The Cat) and, was releases in 1993 and reached number 17 in the UK charts. It was a great episode!
Have spent the day playing with one of these modified drives with WinUAE. WOW! I think this is a game changer. Great work Rob Smith.
This is really interesting stuff! Great video!
Ahhh what I would not give to hear my old Amiga music !! Thank you for this video.
Very clever indeed! We have been wanting one of these for quite a long time.
This is Great! been waiting for this for a long time! This will be a great with AmigaOS3.2's ability to mount ADF's
Wow this is something we've been waiting for years and years....amazing!
So much useful info in this video. Really great job!
Looks like a great product. The only device I ever used was a program called Paradise. It used a cable from a pc to the Amiga to transfer an ADF image directly to Amiga floppy and it did the job pretty well.
Yeah, mine too til my Amiga gave out! 😢
Thanks for the heads-up! Just joined the waiting list!
this is really ground breaking - thanks for your video upload
You look so smart working in your new space!
Thanks Shelby!
That is an awesome drive, i definatly want one. Not much in tech impress's me very much. But this is brilliant. Thanks Neil for bringing this to our attention.
Really enjoy seeing projects like this being made. So cool!
Scusami ho una tastiera Roland.e.96 ho montato l'emulatore floppy USB però non lo riconosce mi puoi dire come fare Grazie
Thank you for pointing me at this little piece of hardware! :D
6:06 - my area too. The water's so hard you could skate on it even when it's NOT frozen.
Nerd-gasm cranked up to 11, love it.
It's amazing to still see so much enthusiasm for Amiga games. I still fire up my A1200 from time to time but most of its games haven't aged well for me.
Really enjoyed this video - I've just subbed so I look forward to working thru the backlog of videos and the future ones too!
Amiga Forever ;-)
So Cool to see the Amiga Disks being read in Realtime :)
I also had an Atari ST 1040 ;-)
And an Amiga 2000.
such a " cracking " bit of kit , just what is needed . nice work
Oh this looks great, I've joined the waiting list for one.
Interesting timing. I had only just written an .adf file to floppy to transfer to my Amiga (using an old IBM slim USB floppy drive) only moments before clicking this video. The reason my Amiga is running at all is thanks in large part to the very active Amiga community that Neil refers to as well. Great community!
I own 2 working Amiga's, one with a 80MB hard drive
I can relate with the excitement for Amiga fans here as I always wanted to load up C64 diskettes into my PC as a kid myself.
Of course it wouldn't work right away but seeing this gives me very similar feelings.
Incredible development! Perhaps it’s time to ask my Dad to dig my old Amiga disk boxes out of the loft and send them over? I love the authentic Amiga UI shown in the Windows app too. Fantastic work to everyone involved!
Great video mate, I spent ages trying to burn adf's to disks using null modems etc. I have gotek now but would have loved this back before I got that, That Colgate game is Harald Hårdtand Kampen om de Rene Tænder I featured it in my C64 Hidden gems series ....for being an advertising gimmick game its pretty decent. Maybe now this is made it could pave the way to a proper Amiga mini with a real working floppy drive that would be awesome, I actually knocked a 3d model up of just that idea a few years ago and looked into how it would work with an emulator but everyone said it wasnt possible seems they were wrong :-)
👏Fantastic news. Great to see this.
I see the wall turned out very nice. I love the industrial look, I know nothing about Amigas except what I have learned from you and it is interesting.
Thanks bod!
Some people might appreciate support for Robs little drive in the Minimig core :D
Great job, truly amazing result! Big hail to Rob! I'm so interested and enthusiast that I've carefully put a like thumb on just every comment and reply since now, as a little contribute!
Hehe thanks Mark, and yes Rob has done a great job not just in making this but documenting it so thoroughly
@@RMCRetro True, I'm just watching. Cheers, M
Was able to utilize my 500 in the early nineties with single-sided 3.5 in discs, as there was an Amiga word processor that would save out in wordperfect 4.2 that would open on my 486 sub notebook and vice versa... it was an interesting time to be a writer, researcher and designer.
Support for this on the MiSTer Amiga core would be very nice. It will be probably just a matter of time.
The main mister guy is very much against using original media. He wouldn't even work on getting cd rom drvers enabled for the ao486 core. He thinks it's pointless, which is a shame.
Amiga Forever should definitely bundle this :D
Remember, all the games will be out there on ADF but the real gold nuggets are saved game disks, songs and instrument disk for trackers, coverdisk (though a huge percentage of them have been archived too) and not forgetting Sensible Soccer where you have taken a non-fashionable team to Euro glory and have a massive bank balance to spend! Bliss!
Brilliant! While I already converted my old disks using the Kryoflux, I nevertheless just set myself on Rob's waiting list!
Definitely subbed you sir, Do more Amiga stuff please! it's nice to see my favourite system getting love.
Pro tip: in UAE, slide the floppy speed to the left instead of right and there's a "Turbo" option which is essentially an "as fast as it can go" speed.
Just a very small heads up: I've actually had ADFs that wouldn't load properly on the Turbo setting (I admit, it was like 2 or 3 out of hundreds of floppies loaded). So, if you run into a loading problem, try setting the speed back to 100% and see if that works.
In the long run, the Turbo option will save you a lot of time, though.
we are 1970 kids we allready know how wait floppy load xD
If I had my old Amiga disks I would 100% have bought this drive. Sadly, I pulled my Amiga out decades ago for a bit of nostalgia and every disk I tried couldn't be read.
So I made the heartbreaking trip to the local tip and threw them all away.
It only occured to me after they were all gone that it _might_ only have been the disk drive. I lost all my art, tracker modules and programming projects :(
The retro scene is amazing right now, not just for the Amiga but all sorts! I recently discovered that there are projects to make 1:1 recreations of logic boards for Macintosh SE, SE/30 and Classic machines. Then you have all these awesome Arduino, Pi and FPGA projects. Just so much going on, I love it :)
This is awesome, and he also provided great instructions for building it, although it seems quite tricky due to cramped space inside the slim floppy drive. This, and amiberry are just amazing projects, and the way to get that old Amiga into the 21st century without spending 100s of £/$/€