Possible to read Amiga disks on a PC? Yes, actually

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Mon Aug 6 00:33:16 2001

On 5 Aug 2001, Frank McConnell wrote:
> Mark <mark_k_at_totalise.co.uk> wrote:
> Try <http://fast.emuunlim.com/disk2fdi/index.html>.
> ^ note spelling correction

Thank you.

I went there. There was ABSOLUTELY NO information on the website other
than the claim that it could do Amiga. In order to get ANY idea of what
it is, you need to download it, UNZIP it, and look at the files.

It's a clever idea:
The Amiga is MFM, but without a compatible sector header.
Read a valid "Western Digital" style sector header from a valid PC
diskette in one drive, and then suddenly, without telling the 765, switch
drives, where it will continue to read. Thus, it gets a srctor geader
from one drive and then reads the Amiga track from the other drive as it
if were the sector that had been started. The CRC will, of course, be
wrong, so error detection will need to be done in software.

Reading reliability has some issues, and it may be necessary to do
repeated tries. The beginning of the Amiga track might not succeed, and
it is as likely to line up with the clock pulses (what these guys call
"synchronization bits") instead of the data pulses.


Breaking out the Amiga sectors from the Amiga raw track is left as a
problem for the user.

Deciphering the Amiga file and directory system to get files rather than
raw tracks/sectors is left as a problem for the user.

So, ...
It is NOT a file transfer disk format conversion.
There are MAJOR complications with any attempt to make a consumer level
file transfer program out of it,
But it does have potential as a clever hack to get raw reads!


--
Fred Cisin                      cisin_at_xenosoft.com
XenoSoft                        http://www.xenosoft.com
PO Box 1236                     (510) 558-9366
Berkeley, CA 94701-1236
Received on Mon Aug 06 2001 - 00:33:16 BST

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