CodeWalrus

Development => Hardware => Topic started by: Keoni29 on December 09, 2014, 10:51:15 PM

Title: USB floppy drive in AMIGA
Post by: Keoni29 on December 09, 2014, 10:51:15 PM
I received a Gotek diskette drive emulator in the mail today.  It reads floppy disk images from the usb stick and acts like a regular floppy drive. Using the buttons you can select a disk image file on the usb stick.

These drives are intended to be used in PC's and keyboards, but an awesome guy wrote this firmware (https://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/) that allows you to use it in Commodore Amiga computers.
It's simple enough to flash the firmware using a windows program and a usb -> serial cable. I had to do a little bit of a casemod to fit the thing in the AMIGA.

In this picture you see the drive emulator with a usb stick inside. The program I loaded is called Protracker (audio editing software :))
Title: Re: USB floppy drive in AMIGA
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on December 10, 2014, 12:06:50 AM
Yeah that machine to the left was intriguing me earlier on Telegram. :) I like that idea, though, because if something requires a diskette drive then you can use this and download anything.

Also what does this tracker do? Does it do full music or chiptune-like? I would like to hear some stuff made with i such as a quest for the legendary axe remix. :)
Title: Re: USB floppy drive in AMIGA
Post by: Yuki on December 10, 2014, 03:00:29 AM
That's pretty cool ^_^
Title: Re: USB floppy drive in AMIGA
Post by: Duke "Tape" Eiyeron on December 10, 2014, 06:50:12 AM
And now add a quad core to your Amiga! :w00t:
Title: Re: USB floppy drive in AMIGA
Post by: Keoni29 on December 10, 2014, 08:38:24 AM
It can do pretty much anything because it's sample based. It was common to use chippy samples (basic waveforms) for they were easy to generate in software. For recording sound you need some kind of sound digitizer device. The AMIGA has 4 wave channels. The only limits are ram and sample rate. My amiga has been expanded from 0.5 to 1MB ram. You need the 1MB to be able to run protracker.
Title: Re: USB floppy drive in AMIGA
Post by: Duke "Tape" Eiyeron on December 10, 2014, 10:50:12 AM
1 MB? That's pretty low but is in the standards of before.

Yeah chiptune! Make us a little chippy tune with it!
Title: Re: USB floppy drive in AMIGA
Post by: Keoni29 on December 10, 2014, 11:22:46 AM
Still a lot more than its predecessor: the c64 with just 64k ram
Title: Re: USB floppy drive in AMIGA
Post by: Hooloowalrus on December 10, 2014, 01:34:13 PM
Which is still more than the TI-83+'s 32k of RAM. Thanks TI.
Title: Re: USB floppy drive in AMIGA
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on December 10, 2014, 02:00:16 PM
Oh I see now. I wasn't sure because some Amiga games didn't always seem to use wave samples and sounded closer to chiptune material.

And Hooloovoo lol  on top of that 84+ files must be stôred in RAM to run.
Title: Re: USB floppy drive in AMIGA
Post by: novenary on December 11, 2014, 09:35:08 AM
Lol yeah few things can actually execute from mass storage actually. When you start an application on your PC it copied the executable to RAM.