Rob Smith bringing The Cure to the Amiga floppy woes!

I had a tear in my eye when hearing the "tick tick" of the hungry disk drive!

25-ish years ago, my Amiga 1200 setup was complete, once I installed a hard drive, and found a utility to read MS-DOS formatted discs on my Amiga. I'd spend my lunch hours at college on the Internet, downloading .lha files to 720k discs to take home to my Amiga. Never thought that the reverse would be an option, or even needed.

This sole invention has rekindled my interest in the Amiga...

I love solutions to things that "cannot be done"!

@barnabydinosaurroadsafetyp3457

3 жыл бұрын

amiga fans still around ..... good to see bizarre but good...

@TVperson1

3 жыл бұрын

"cannot be done" ie "I can't be f**ked figuring that out"

@Tech-geeky

2 жыл бұрын

but... but it can :D

One thing I love about RMC; the delivery is the same as presenters on Tomorrows World back in the day.

@RMCRetro

3 жыл бұрын

Haha that's really quite the compliment thank you

Oh man! Hearing U4IA Cryptoburners again after so many years was a wonderful blast from the past!

@Gekneveld

3 жыл бұрын

What a song!

@cowbutt6

3 жыл бұрын

I worked with him for a couple of years as my first job after uni. I've sent him a link to this video.

@U4iaF8

3 жыл бұрын

Nice to hear that you enjoyed my music. Thank you all. Always makes my day.

WOAH! This is freaking awesome. There are a bunch of folks in WAUG who have been asking me for this for years. I will show you video at tonight's meeting. Great job RMC!

@JustWasted3HoursHere

3 жыл бұрын

Fancy meeting you here, AmigaBill!

I didn't realize there was a difficulty of actual reading Amiga floppies on a PC (I'm new to the scene). The drive mod to convert a PC to work on an Amiga only requires looking at pin 2 (density select) and pin 34 (disk change/ready) so you'd think the PC controller would have complete ability to do whatever is necessary to read that disk. Interesting that it couldn't and you need additional hardware (interface) to get it to work. I'm guessing Rob's USB floppy is just a standard USB drive he took apart and interfaced his board with. I'll have to check out his Discord server...pretty cool project.

This is truly amazing - well done, Rob!

Nice to see my tune getting an airing in its native format. Long live ProTracker. =8*)

@RMCRetro

3 жыл бұрын

Oooh you made the mod?

@U4iaF8

3 жыл бұрын

@@RMCRetro a long long time ago, but yes. That's me =8*)

@RMCRetro

3 жыл бұрын

Awesome! Great tune thank you

@U4iaF8

3 жыл бұрын

@@RMCRetro More than welcome. You've used it to show off a great bit of tech. Now I'm sat here thinking i could get my stack of disks out of the garage that have been lugged from house to house for the last 30 years! =8*)

Thanks for yet another great episode, Neil. For once one that will actually SAVE me money rather than the opposite. A bit of information on that Colgate game (and a fun piece of bonus trivia at the end): It's actually not German, but Danish. It was developed by Silverrock Productions (of Hugo fame). It's also not called "Colgate", but "Harald Hårdtand: Kampen om de Rene Tænder" (roughly translated "Harold Hardtooth: The Fight for Clean Teeth"). The confusion over the name likely stems from the fact that the Colgate logo takes up 50% of the menu screen and the actual title of the game is relegated to a small text string underneath. I was employed at a later iteration of Silverrock Productions, later named ITE and finally NDS Denmark, having gone through a few buyouts and takeovers. Harald Hårdtand was one of a couple of brand deal games developed there - another one being "Guldkorn Expressen" based on a popular Danish cereal product called Guldkorn (pretty much the same as Quaker's Sugar Puffs - and in fact, Quaker later took over production before selling it off again). A fun piece of inside trivia on the Harald Hårdtand game: The released MS-DOS port of the game could not be completed. The porting duties were handed off to a third party who apparently never finished developing the last levels of the game, but instead just increased the difficulty exponentially to make sure no-one would be any the wiser. I don't remember if a fixed version was ever released to remedy that, but I do know that it took a while before we found out. QA back then was not what it is today. :) [Darn. I edited the message for grammar and lost the heart icon from Neil. Oh, well. Easy come, easy go. :) ]

I remember following Rob's documentation to build a prototype for using a real disk drive late last year - amazing to see how it's come along and how slick the final solution is!

Excelsior! Cheers to the engineers who transform "can't be done" into a fully-functional & delivered product. Y'all make my retro-nerd world go 'round! (and you too Neil, RMC is always a highlight in my YT feed

Thanks to Rob and you for letting us know of the latest Amiga projects especially the external floppy for pc. I love your suggestion to one day having it work on a RPi...all the best and thanks again.

I had a Commodore Amiga. It was in retrospect, epic. Well done, the presenter for bringing it back to to life. Thanks. Brilliant.

Great stuff! I'm so happy to see peeps still creating cool stuff for the Amigas 👍🏻👍🏻

Well this made me smile, a lot! It's always felt awkward swapping ADF files about whenever I've run up WinUAE, this just makes it more like the days when I owned an Amiga.

That's absolutely great! I mean, no question, my favorite is playing on the original hardware. But to have the opportunity to quickly get disk images of your old disks or write adf's to a real disk are fantastic! Greetings, Doc64!

If you ask me a knighthood is in order.....what a marvelous piece of work by Rob Smith !!

Fabulous bit of kit! Adding this to my want list.... I have a couple of storage boxes of disks in the loft, and many have random titles that I wrote but now have no idea what they were! This will be so much more convenient than getting one of my amigas out just for archiving. Brilliant! I get the feeling I’ll need that printed disk cleaner too......

Thank you, thank you and thanks again Neil for this and the genius creator of of this very special bit of kit. I have 100s of Amiga 500 discs and I haven't been able to use my Amiga for nearly 20 years as it needs a 'trash to treasure' in my own cave to get it working again. This will come in extremely handy!

Game changer. Amiga dev scene never fails to disappoint. Cheers Neil for the insight.

Fantastic effort, appreciate your hard work sir.

I love hearing about new ways to use old tech.

Really awesome bit of kit. Great work by Rob!

Great stuff! I can think of a lot of potential projects with that drive as a main component!

Long Live the Amiga! It will hopefully never truly die

Very clever indeed! We have been wanting one of these for quite a long time.

Two videos in one week! Wow, thanks Neil! :D

This has blown my mind ....I need one ....great vid and thanks 👍

The aesthetic of the Amiga UI has always been a bit enchanting to me. I'm not old enough to have ever used one when they were contemporary, but I like a lot about the interface design.

Awesome. As Neil says distilled water on discs. Do not use any type of alcohol to clean the disks as it will eventually dissolve them.

So much useful info in this video. Really great job!

Have spent the day playing with one of these modified drives with WinUAE. WOW! I think this is a game changer. Great work Rob Smith.

Wow this is something we've been waiting for years and years....amazing!

It's amazing to still see so much enthusiasm for Amiga games. I still fire up my A1200 from time to time but most of its games haven't aged well for me.

This is really interesting stuff! Great video!

Really enjoy seeing projects like this being made. So cool!

@giovannitessito5672

3 жыл бұрын

Scusami ho una tastiera Roland.e.96 ho montato l'emulatore floppy USB però non lo riconosce mi puoi dire come fare Grazie

this is really ground breaking - thanks for your video upload

This is Great! been waiting for this for a long time! This will be a great with AmigaOS3.2's ability to mount ADF's

Thanks for the heads-up! Just joined the waiting list!

Incredible development! Perhaps it’s time to ask my Dad to dig my old Amiga disk boxes out of the loft and send them over? I love the authentic Amiga UI shown in the Windows app too. Fantastic work to everyone involved!

Really enjoyed this video - I've just subbed so I look forward to working thru the backlog of videos and the future ones too!

such a " cracking " bit of kit , just what is needed . nice work

Wow wow WOW! This is fantastic work, Amiga will never die!

@RichLOiD

3 жыл бұрын

Rob's waiting list has now been joined. Thanks Neil for another excellent video explaining with the perfect level of detail, you got my Amiga juices all flowing!

You look so smart working in your new space!

@RMCRetro

3 жыл бұрын

Thanks Shelby!

My god, I remember Pro Tracker! You could rip the audio straight from the game “Flash Back” and play it in Pro Tracker. I remember my mind being blown at the time that I could see how they made the music on a, for the time, triple A game.

Oh this looks great, I've joined the waiting list for one.

Ahhh what I would not give to hear my old Amiga music !! Thank you for this video.

That is an awesome drive, i definatly want one. Not much in tech impress's me very much. But this is brilliant. Thanks Neil for bringing this to our attention.

The guys that made the new c64 announce that this year they are going to do an Amiga. This drive would be cool to be used in such project.

@JustWasted3HoursHere

3 жыл бұрын

Whoa, I need to look into that!

@Yesterzine

3 жыл бұрын

The new C64 is basically just a Raspberry Pi with notions so I'm not sure what that'd give you over a Pi400 done right though.

@tahirahmed33

3 жыл бұрын

Cool

@pnvgordinho

3 жыл бұрын

@@Yesterzine If they make an Amiga, full size, with a working keyboard and a floppy drive like this, I would rather have this Amiga than a PI400. Im sure it would cost a lot more but I would prefer that Amiga. They are probably not going to put a disk drive but if they put something like this, it would be a cool thing to have.

@scouse1967

3 жыл бұрын

@@Yesterzine There is no Raspberry Pi board inside the new "The C64" computer but infact it has a main PCB board with the main IC chip and some components onboard and a small PCB board for the side USB ports and power button.Yes the machine is based around Commodore 64 Emulation and it does this so brilliant. No messing around with settings/options and it's an extremely well made product.

Floppies on Amiga. It was $30 back then for 10 blank Kao disks here in Canada...boy did I own many. The disk ticking is a pleasure to hear as well. Fantastic and brilliant work.

Definitely subbed you sir, Do more Amiga stuff please! it's nice to see my favourite system getting love.

Big shout out to Rob, genius, respect. I have disks that say samples on the cover.

Thank you for pointing me at this little piece of hardware! :D

Being able to directly read a legacy disk is a great step forward. I have lots of disks from a number of platforms that might have interesting things on (well, interesting to me!) but will take time & effort to image, mount in an emulator and poke about on, so the job drifts towards the bottom of the to-do iist. Not to mention that being able to use real hardware on an emulator adds to the experience enormously.

@BrennanYoung

3 жыл бұрын

yep, lots of weird floppy formats that are difficult to work with (sewing machines, synthesisers etc.)

Great job, truly amazing result! Big hail to Rob! I'm so interested and enthusiast that I've carefully put a like thumb on just every comment and reply since now, as a little contribute!

@RMCRetro

3 жыл бұрын

Hehe thanks Mark, and yes Rob has done a great job not just in making this but documenting it so thoroughly

@mark12358

3 жыл бұрын

@@RMCRetro True, I'm just watching. Cheers, M

👏Fantastic news. Great to see this.

I just have to comment about how great that recycled wood wall looks behind you. It really looks amazing!

@RMCRetro

3 жыл бұрын

Thanks Taylor!

I see the wall turned out very nice. I love the industrial look, I know nothing about Amigas except what I have learned from you and it is interesting.

@RMCRetro

3 жыл бұрын

Thanks bod!

The retro scene is amazing right now, not just for the Amiga but all sorts! I recently discovered that there are projects to make 1:1 recreations of logic boards for Macintosh SE, SE/30 and Classic machines. Then you have all these awesome Arduino, Pi and FPGA projects. Just so much going on, I love it :)

I am utterly gobsmacked! This is human ingenuity at its finest. A big round of applause to Rob Smith 👏👏👏 Not just for making this project in the first place, but in particular for making it open source, so that anyone with fewer than ten thumbs* can make it themselves. I visited Rob Smith's website, fully expecting to only see ready-made drives selling for ££££, but instead I found all these amazing instructions on how to DIY it. Not only is Mr. Smith devilishly clever - or so it seems - but his community spirit is of the highest level as well. Faith in Humanity is pretty much restored again 😊 * And an Arduino 😄

This makes me cry with utter joy! My life is complete. More complete once I set this up.

Your new fangled floppy disk data technology is relatively easy to retrieve compared to my cassette tape collection that I still have from my first home computer.

The bit the end about checking disks before you buy them sounds like the basis for a hand held / portable Amiga project for you 😃

Awesome way to archive and backup old Amiga games!

If this does, as you say, make its way to the Raspberry Pi 𝑨𝑴𝑰𝑮𝑨 emulators, my world will be complete.

Brilliant! While I already converted my old disks using the Kryoflux, I nevertheless just set myself on Rob's waiting list!

Superb bit of kit

This is beautiful!!! A true game changer... just think of the possibilities... having this on the MiSTer, on the Vampire.... OMG!!!

Looks like a great product. The only device I ever used was a program called Paradise. It used a cable from a pc to the Amiga to transfer an ADF image directly to Amiga floppy and it did the job pretty well.

@BacktrackerShowRewindssVinylCl

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, mine too til my Amiga gave out! 😢

OHMYGOD! The good old floppy drive clicking! 😄😍

amiga games in the dorm back in the late 80s.. so much fun

This is awesome, and he also provided great instructions for building it, although it seems quite tricky due to cramped space inside the slim floppy drive. This, and amiberry are just amazing projects, and the way to get that old Amiga into the 21st century without spending 100s of £/$/€

All hail Rob Smith!

I played that Colgate game - and it was amazing! I even think it's the game I played most on my Amiga back in the 90's.

I recently found my old Amiga in the attic of my parents home. I'm falling in love all over again.

This is exactly what I’ve been wanting!

I'm reminded of the DOS program disk2fdi. Everyone said over and over you can't read an Amiga disk on a PC... It was just accepted as fact. Then disk2FDI comes out, and if you have a PC with two onboard floppy drives, you can make an image of the amiga disk on your PC. I am always impressed with those type of "It's impossible..." "Hold my Jolt cola..." moments. ;-)

This is so cool. It's amazing how many options we have nowadays to preserve floppy disks. I mean, I have the ADF Transfer disks for Amiga 500, which is relatively cheap, but a lot of hassle with constantly switching disks (might be better on the A600/Amigas with CF card readers), Amiga Explorer and the ADF Sender Terminal. But both these options require additional cabling AND cards (most modern PCs don't have a COM port anymore) and the PC obviously needs to be close to the Amiga so you can connect the null modem cables. This however gives you total freedom of where your PC and where your Amiga is, no additional hardware (other than the Arduino) is necessary. This is really great!

I have been using Amiga Explorer for years to copy adf files to my 1200 via serial. it takes about 8 minutes at a time. this is a game-changer

Awesome video thank-you. I needed something exactly like this, now i dont have to wear out my original disks :)

Very useful device, even for people like me who are not interested in emulators. I've been using a version of this for some time for writing ADFs to disks for use with my amiga. Extremely handy.

I expect you're wondering, where can I get one of these? These are the links you are searching for: ➊ Find out more at: amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk ➋ Chat in Robs Discord Server: discord.gg/4YfXhfDJYn ➌ Sign up to the pre-order waiting list: amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/waiting And if you like what I do head over to patreon.com/rmcretro to become an Official Cave Dweller Neil - RMC

@teemofie

3 жыл бұрын

When will you help me get past those vegetarian cannables?

@worldofretrogameplay6963

3 жыл бұрын

I want one of those disc drives!

@JohnnyWednesday

3 жыл бұрын

I am absolutely 100% positive that a large part of my old Amiga collection is in that box - I wrote G-LOC in the top left hand corner on a red labelled disk! it could be a coincidence, I am in the UK and copy parties were commonplace - but the handwriting, the label colours on Xcopy, cannon fodder, might and magic - it's screaming at me far more than mere similarities

@RMCRetro

3 жыл бұрын

Pop into my discord Johnny I can take some more pics for you tomorrow to see if we can confirm

@RMCRetro

3 жыл бұрын

Put the tofu on your head!

Brilliant! and good tip on cleaning those floppies.

Awesome episode!

That is a very neat bit of gear.

So very useful. Great idea.

It's really good to see such a plug and play solution that should open up the possibility of archival for people who wouldn't have otherwise been able.

6:06 - my area too. The water's so hard you could skate on it even when it's NOT frozen.

Something else to put on the Christmas list!

@theophilusthistler5885

3 жыл бұрын

If your'e naughty you'll get vapour-ware in your stocking.

What a cool device. I have my Amiga 1200 connected to my LAN, so I can always just image stuff using that, but it would be really convenient being able to write images to disk on the PC without having to transfer across first. Basically saves one step.

This is Awesome, that music and samples.sounded aw some too.

That pile of floppies is pure nostalgia. Demo disks with Body Blows and Bars & Pipes coupled with pirated versions of Rick Dangerous and Cannon Fodder - plus the odd retail copy of some game :)

Great vid Neil. Honestly, that drive is really impressive, I’d likely use it for copying files to my hardware Amigas, as they both have internal CF drives and it’s a pain to open them up 🤣 (haven’t tried out PCMCIA on the 1200 yet but I will)

Pro tip: in UAE, slide the floppy speed to the left instead of right and there's a "Turbo" option which is essentially an "as fast as it can go" speed.

@wohlhabendermanager

3 жыл бұрын

Just a very small heads up: I've actually had ADFs that wouldn't load properly on the Turbo setting (I admit, it was like 2 or 3 out of hundreds of floppies loaded). So, if you run into a loading problem, try setting the speed back to 100% and see if that works. In the long run, the Turbo option will save you a lot of time, though.

@JarppaGuru

7 ай бұрын

we are 1970 kids we allready know how wait floppy load xD

As I was watching I thought, ripping narrr so what. I thought, a real-time disk loader would be miles better and then.... WOW my eyes lit up. I need this in my life.

Nice. I only have the SuperCard Pro right now, but have thought about getting GreaseWeasel. Now I guess I need one for sure :)

Some people might appreciate support for Robs little drive in the Minimig core :D