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Making Amiga floppies?

D

Divarin

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Joined
Mar 9, 2019
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565
Location
Cleveland, OH
Hi all. I apologize in advance if this has been asked and answered a million times in the past. I did do some searching of this forum (as well as just searching the net in general).

I just acquired an Amiga 500. I don't really have much experience with Amigas. I am looking for the easiest way to create floppy disks from disk images for it.

I have found different techniques which involve arduinos, parallel cables, serial null modem cables etc.

Of course Google doesn't aways give you the most recent results first so there may be newer, easier, ways that I didn't find.

For Atari STs its pretty easy, I have a dos program that can just write .st images straight to ds/dd disks but it looks like Amiga disks are not going to be quite as simple.

Here's what I have to work with:
A p2-300 with a floppy drive, serial port, parallel port, and can run either dos or windows 98 depending on what cf card I put in it.

A 486 with a floppy drive.

A spare internal pc floppy drive.

A gotek that I pulled out of an Atari ST. I don't want to use the gotek permanently, I'd like to make floppy disks, but if the gotek can be used to get things going ...

A windows 7 machine with USB, serial and parallel but no floppy drives.

A couple of spare raspberry pi's
 
Thanks for the replies. Greaseweazle does look like it's the easiest solution if I purchase a fully built unit as I suck at soldering SMD chips but I was thinking about trying ADTWin first since it would be a lot cheaper (would only need to buy the parts to make the cable).
 
Its a versatile project that keeps adding new support, and capabilities. I bought it in 2013 and I regretted it a bit but in the past bunch of years they added some many new types of disk support. It was worth the purchase.
 
I have successfully used ADTWin to make floppies for my Amiga. It is very picky about motherboards. I ended up using an early P4 and Windows XP. It doesn't do any verification, so it's a good idea to format your floppies in a PC to weed out ones with bad sectors.
 
Your right about that last bit about formatting on a pc. So many bad disks now a days. Glad you have a method for making disks.
 
I decided to go with Greaseweazle. I was seriously considering ADT as it seemed cheaper but I still would have to order parts for building the cable and in the end I might have difficulty getting it to work on my main pc (then again I may not) but it's not much more expensive to go with Greaseweazle and it seemed more versatile and may help in future projects as well.

It's still on order though so I haven't tried it yet. For now I'm using the gotek which works but the ribbon cable isn't quite long enough for me to fit it into position so that I can close the case.
 
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