[XCSSA] Amiga floppy simulator

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

As far as I know, pc2amiga doesn't let you boot from a floppy on the 
PC.  It also doesn't emulate floppy drives, per se.  It gives you a 
"pc:" device which has all devices attached to the pc as 
subdirectories.  For example, the C harddrive is pc:c, and the A floppy 
drive is pc:a.

This sound like a more thorough emulation for those who want emulated 
floppies for games, etc.  But they don't mention harddrives.  Also they 
don't mention using PC floppies.  Most PC floppy drives are physically 
incapable of reading Amiga floppies.  Amiga doesn't use the same 
track/sector layout.  So it sounds like you'd have to use floppy images 
on your PC harddrive.  Tricky stuff, but useful for some games.

Amiga drives also generally don't like the last floppy density "HD".  
They used the previous "DD" (dual density) floppies, which I don't 
imagine you're going to find at stores anymore.  They put an 820Kb 
format on that (similar to old Macs that had an 800Kb format).  Often 
you can "write" amiga format 820Kb on an HD floppy, but not read it 
back.  I've been bitten by that a lot.  Remember that when the Amiga 
came out, 3.5 inch disketes were rare, PC's were still using 5.25" very 
floppy floppies.  So Amiga was way ahead of the curve at the time using 
3.5 inch DD disks.

I have at least one of the special Amiga drives that could read/write HD 
floppies on an Amiga 3000.  This was problematic because one of the 
custom chips couldn't handle the data rate from HD floppy drives.  So a 
special floppy drive was made and put on a small number of 3000's (very 
rare) that had a special "slow" motor mode for the HD disks.  IIRC, you 
could have a 1640Kb format if you wanted, but no other Amiga could read 
them.  I mainly used this to read 1440Kb PC floppies.  UNFORTUNATELY, my 
special floppy drive, now 17 years old, is too flaky to use anymore.

Other companies made external drives that would also work by virtue of 
having a memory buffer that would read out the data slower than it was 
read off of the disk.

ANYWAY, I don't use floppies much anymore.  Though it ticked me off when 
macs came out w/o floppies because I still needed them then for my K2000 
synthesizer.  Now I have a K2661, which uses a memory card (of a type 
that's also becoming hard to find...that happened too fast).

It also ticked me off when my 2006 Prius could not be had with a 
cassette tape deck.  But I've moved on to plugging in an iPod instead.

VHS, the tape format that many people, including me, wanted to die right 
off, has finally vanished from mainstream (I still have 100's of them, 
though, along with S-VHS and even D-VHS decks).  DVD's are king now, but 
what about the future...already two successors are in the wings.

The old format that never seems to die is the LP record.  Check out 
Acoustic Sounds, Music Direct, or Elusive Disk to find out about all the 
LP releases coming out every week.  Because it's not digital, it can't 
be made obsolete.

Charles





xcssa-admin@xcssa.org wrote:

>sounds like pc2amiga
>
>--- xcssa-admin@xcssa.org wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Guys/gals, is this something to look into?
>>
>>
>>    
>>
>http://cgi.ebay.com/Amiga-500-1000-2000-3000-Floppy-Simulator-w-MPDOS-Pro_W0QQitemZ320078646996QQihZ011QQcategoryZ4598QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
>  
>
>>"MPDOS Professional for Amiga (version 1.00)
>>supports simulating the
>>four Amiga disk drives devices: DF0, DF1, DF2, and
>>DF3. It comes with
>>a DB25->IDC34 cable that connects to the Amiga's
>>internal floppy drive
>>connector and to the PC's parallel port. It lets you
>>use Amiga image
>>disk files to directly boot your Amiga from your
>>PC."
>>    
>>