Real Floppy Disk Drive for MiSTer FPGA Current Progress

[Xbytez]

Rob Smith @RobSmithDev has posted a youtube update on where he is at progress wise in supporting using real floppy disks for cores like the Amiga (minimig) on the MiSTer FPGA.

[bazza_12]

might buy an amiga external drive, before they too sky rocket in price.. lol

[kathleen]

This is a very good news thanks @Xbytez,

@bazza_12, to me you'll not need to buy an Amiga FDD, it should work with a PC drive (like with Winuae) which is still findable at low price

[bazza_12]

it would be amazing to see the amiga hand boot screen and be able to insert a disk.

[NightShadowPT]

I'm really excited to see this project brought to fruition and integrated into the cores. Will be great to hear that drive click on my Amiga core

[Insert Disk Two]

It's there anything similar which would allow me to use a real Commodore 1541 drive worry c64 core?

[akeley]

It's there anything similar which would allow me to use a real Commodore 1541 drive worry c64 core?

viewtopic.php?t=4469

[jca]

See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSTsR-rqNCw

[Lukage]

It seems that he goes very much like the same path I was going last year. If there is no MCU used it means that he needs to do some form of logic IO expansion, possibly by shift register/latch.

This was not reliable in Amiga core at all. I was just not able to meet timing needed for proper floppy drive control, even with some most critical pins connected directly and not via shift register. I tried with discrete chips, and also with XC97xx CPLD.

If you want to use floppy drive with Amiga core now, you just need a level converter and description/code patch which I submitted to Amiga sub on this forum. This needs more pins than just user port, but it is very reliable.

We will see, but hearing "i just started learning Verilog" on the end of the video is not very encouraging

[retroricki]

Is there a way that the amiga 3.2 would see a usb zip drive as a floppy or be able to use a iomega usb drive. When i try to run the amiga iomega software it keeps looking for a scsi iomega? Would love to get my 250 zip drive working on here

[rhester72]

Is there a way that the amiga 3.2 would see a usb zip drive as a floppy or be able to use a iomega usb drive. When i try to run the amiga iomega software it keeps looking for a scsi iomega? Would love to get my 250 zip drive working on here

No.

[R4M]

Well, it might work in another way. The usb iomega should show up under linux as /dev/sdX. You can create a symbolic link from your Amiga directory, like

ln -s /dev/sdX /media/fat/Amiga/iomega.hdf

Then you should be able to select that file as harddrive in the OSD menu. The iomega software will most probably not work though.

[retroricki]

Thanks i'll try the sym link and see if i can get it working thru that.

[LamerDeluxe]

I wonder if support for Greaseweazle or DrawBridge could be added to MiSTer. I recently got a Greaseweazle and it works quite well with WinUAE.

I also bought a USB to IDE adapter and was able to boot from my old (professional file system formatted) Amiga 4000 harddisk with WinUAE.

[rhester72]

@LamerDeluxe The creator of DrawBridge was looking into this late last year - haven't seen any progress in a while.

[Agrajag]

Rob posted an update on this.

Will be awesome to get floppy support on other cores such as the Atari ST/PC and maybe even older systems like the C64/Ti-99.

I know some see this as a waste of time, but floppy disks are awesome.

[FPGA64]

We already have it for the C64. HW exists to connect a real 1541

[dmckean]

We already have it for the C64. HW exists to connect a real 1541

Support for a real 1541 is one thing because its controller has its own CPU and talks over a slow interface. Getting the C64 core to talk to a PC floppy drive would involve implementing that controller in the core and doing similar things that are being done with the Amiga support.

[NightShadowPT]

This last update from Rob is really cool and it shows how close we are to having a working device.

Was also very excited to learn that a regular PC floppy drive can be used to read/write both PC and Amiga disks without any additional hardware (besides the board that Rob has created).

I had concerns about how the floppy drive would be powered, but Rob assured me it could be through the MiSTer (for a single drive) - multiple drives will require other power sources.

Lastly, I hope the final version of the board supports USB power in addition (or instead of) the power barrel, as it is easier to find a power source that will not require yet another power outlet.

Thanks to Rob for all his hard work on this project.

[Caldor]

It works I am helping test the adapter Rob is working on and it seems it might have some issues, but overall it works with most games I have tested. I made a video of what I have tested so far, but I have not uploaded it yet.

I also tried copying an ADF to a real floppy and that failed, even after finding a floppy without errors on. There are several testers so I hope we can find the possible issues with it so they can be worked out. Writing often can cause more issues than reading, so I probably should do some tests with save disks and such.

I hope it means we can soon see a production of these adapters. We will see I guess. But it works just using the user port on the analog IO board.