Read Amiga Floppies Using An Arduino

So you spent your youth learning your craft in front of an Amiga 500+, but a quarter century later all you have left is a broken computer and a pile of floppies you can’t read any more. What’s to be done? This was the position [Rob Smith] found himself in, and since some of the commercial solutions to ripping Amiga floppies were rather expensive, he decided to have a go at making his own.

His write-up makes for a fascinating read, as he delves into the physical interface of the PC floppy drive he used, and into the timing required from the Arduino that controlled it. He faced some challenges in getting his code to be fast enough for the task, and goes into some of the optimisation techniques he employed. His code for both Arduino and Windows  is open-source, and can be downloaded from his GitHub repository. Future plans involve supporting the FDI disc format as well as ADF, and adding the ability to write discs.

We’ve shown you a lot of Amigas over the years, but perhaps of most relevance here in our archive are this Raspberry Pi floppy emulator and this floppy autoloader for archiving a disc collection.

Via Hacker News.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, classic hacks

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