...with 3rd party interfaces for Amiga, ATARI ST and DOS/PC Disk formats
Created by Robert Smith @RobSmithDev https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk
This project uses an Arduino to interface with a floppy disk drive and communicate with a PC in order to recover the data from any formatted disks. This includes Windows software to copy from and to ADF files.
This project is what is behind getting real floppy disks loading in real time into emulators like WinUAE and Amiberry
The Arduino firmware allows to read the raw MFM data from each track of the floppy. Decoding of the sector data is done on the PC. Usually a floppy image file is created (ADF for AMIGA, .img for ATARI ST and PC/DOS).
The 'firmware' can read MFM data from SD, DD and HD disks, although HD is untested. This would therefore be able to read data from AMIGA, ATARI ST, PC DOS, COMMODORE C64 etc.
This Visual Studio 2019 and Linux project contains two applications, a command line, and a Windows dialog based application allow reading and writing of Amiga formatted DD floppy disks. Using the supplied makefile you should be able to compile this on Linux. It has been tested with Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian - Debian-based)
This is the Arduino source code/sketch for all Floppy formats.
- Detect disk density (SD/DD or HD)
- Motor ON/OFF
- Seek to Track 0
- Seek to any track (up to 82 - be careful, this can damage some drives!)
- read write protection status
- Read index pulse
- read raw track data (its RAW, so FM, MFM; SD, DD or HD)
- write track data (in DD with precompensation and HD)
- Evaulate drive quality
For further details including how to wire this up please visit [https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk] or join the discussion on discord at [https://discord.gg/HctVgSFEXu]
- v2.7 Firmware 1.9.15 (see sketch notes) Added support for reading and writing HD Amiga floppy disks Added 'auto-detect' HD floppy disk inserted Fixed race condition with aborting reading Overhalled the UI to make it much cleaner Automatic update check (this is done in a way that is 100% private, there is no way I will ever know you checked for update) Slightly updated logo New EEPROM options to control how DrawBridge behaves Massively improved diagnostics: Can now detect DrawBridge vs DrawBridge Plus Fixed issue with read diagnostics Can detect the RPM of the drive for faults Will perform diagnostics for DD and HD Lists enabled and supported features of your DrawBridge setup Added optional support for direct access via the FTDI driver instead of COM ports Added ability to perform erase cycles before writing to a disk Added option for ADFs to be written index aligned Improved accuracy for *UAE disk reading and writing
- v2.6 (firmware 1.8a) - Add support for 'noclick' Fixed issue with SCP/ADF file extension being incorrect if you change the type after choosing the filename Added some more tests during diagnostics
- v2.5 A whole load of changes including:
Fixed an encoding issue which prevented disks being read under Kickstart 1.3 or lower.
Added support for read "streaming" with index sync support
Changed read timings slightly which means more disks can now be recovered! Added support for PRECOMP disk writing to improve readability as you go past track 40 Added some new functions which allow for more direct control of the drive - v2.4 Improved support for Usb to Serial devices based on findings from GitHub user "prickle" - firmware is now V1.7
- v2.33 Merged with Pull Request #9 (Detect and read out HD floppy disks 1.44M by kollokollo) - firmware is now V1.6
- v2.32 Merged with Pull Request #6 (Modified the behavior of the current track location on Arduino boot - paulofduarte) which also addresses issues with some drives and updated firmware to 1.4 Made a small change to the diagnostics code to also erase the track before writing it
- v2.31 Upgraded the PC code side to work with Visual Studio 2019 resolving issue #11 (ourIThome) and merging pull request #13 (bassclefstudio) Fixed a few typos in ArduinoInterface.cpp from pull request #12 (Crkk)
- V2.2 Fixed 99% of checksum errors when writing by erasing the track first
- V2.1 Diagnostics and potential write bug fixed
- V2.0 Disk reading has been vastly improved and you can now also write disks!
- V1.0 Initial release, can read disks fairly well
The above application apparently works under WINE, however,
Github user "kollokollo" made some scripts for reading other formats on Linux
too as follows:
The ATARI ST and DOS/PC floppy formats can be decoded whit these scripts.
9,10,11 or 18 Sectors per track. Up to 82 tracks, DD (ca. 800 kBytes) or
HD (1.4 MBytes). The images usually contain a FAT12 file system which can be
directly mounted by linux without any additional driver.
For more information see
https://github.com/kollokollo/ArduinoFloppyDiskReader/tree/new/for_linux
They need the X11-Basic interpreter from http://x11-basic.sourceforge.net/
To read commodore 1581 disks, check out the project at:
https://github.com/hpingel/pyAccess1581
If you want to use the AVR directly instead of within the Arduino environment, then jump to [https://github.com/jtsiomb/usbamigafloppy] where John Tsiombikas has ported the code.
This entire project is available under the GNU General Public License v3 licence. See licence.txt for more details.