Available for OS4?

Are these devices usable on OS4 NG systems? Classic systems?

RAD:
ZIP: ZipDrives
JAZ: JazDrives
PC0: CrossDOS PC Floppy
MAC: CrossDOS Mac Floppy

All can be used on classics if you have the right interface, eg. some xip and jazz drives are SCSI

RAD should work on both but is fairly poinless on any system with a harddrive especially NG.

Crossdos for floppy might work on Ng systems if you have one with a floppy drive (SE/XE)

basically zip, jazz & floppys have all been replaced with usb sticks and harddrives, stick a USB card in a classic and you're sorted for all systems.

@mritter0

I've used a Zip100/250 drive with OS4.x. No problems at all. I seem to remember using the CrossDOS PC0 as well with no difficulty. It has been a long time since using either.

@mritter0

RAD is supported, if you need it.
ZIP uses the old IDE or SCSI interface, this hook right up, there is also ZIP for USB.
JAZ was just another compactor to ZIP, I guess the same things apply.
"PC0" well this basically what AmigaONE has unless you buy Cat Wessel, CrossDOS is part of AmigaOS4.1.
"MAC" Well I guess that will require a Cat Wessel, maybe I'm wrong, and I think you need CrossMac to use that, I have not tried but it should work with 680x0 filesystem.

But way? Every one use USB 2.0 sticks this days.

@LiveForIt

Quote:

Not entirely true. It's been a while, but I'm fairly sure that DF0 still works, with a slightly different disk geometry to a classic (to account for the PC-style controller) and FFS.

It can't read "proper" Amiga format disks, and I don't know whether these disks can be read in a Classic (suspect they will work under OS4 on any hardware, but prior to that, who knows), but there is FFS/DF0 support on floppies, not just FAT/PC0.

@LiveForIt

Why?

In my case, my wife had a lot of old Zip100/250 disks and MSDOS 720 and 1.44 floppies that she wanted backed up.

Unfortunately, I am still waiting on a system with real USB on the motherboard to use my Kryoflux to back up my old Amiga disks.

This of course brings up an inquiry from long ago in a thread far far away (which I can't find). Is it possible to use the XMOS and Xorro for 880/1.76 ffs and diskspare format Amiga disk I/O? I am sure XMOS is overkill for such I/O work, but at least it would be a use for it.

@interrogative

Well yes, if make your own XZorro floppy controller, you need to learn XC language, If where to do I Use bunch octocopters, to prevent toasting X5000, X1000 motherboard, to freaking expensive to toast. Then you need to make driver to talk to the XMOS chip.

I think better use Sam460 GPIO or I2C serial interface, there lots of Raspberry stuff most likely plug right in, the floppy controller is not that fast, on Cat Wessel, I clock in some of the signals manually, it not big problem, uploading the firmware was most time critical part of MK4 driver.

@Chris

First of all filesystem has nothing to do with disk geometry.

Amiga500 DD floppy controller uses 11 sectors per rotation/track, PC uses 9 sectors per rotation/track. In addition, Amiga and PC uses different MFM encoding.
If you have AmigaONE/PC DD disk with FastFilesystem, you need to mount that on a Amiga using MFM.device normally used for CrossDOS, while you can use FastFileSystem the floppy disk will be incompatible.

If they were compatible, you won't need CatWessel or Kryoflux.

Only the old A1-SE and XE had a floppy controller in the VIA Southbridge chip. No newer NG hardware has such a thing, so the only hope of reading/writing floppies is some external hardware like a CatWeasel.

The reason why the A1-SE/XE floppy controller can't read/write Amiga format disks is that the hardware controller is designed to read and process PC-format disk encoding and can't do anything else. It can't even provide "raw" data that software could process, as in a Classic.

Only a CatWeasel (or perhaps a KryoFlux) can get over that problem.

@tonyw Quote:
Why not use a USB Floppy drive to read/write floppies? (Only PC ones of course.)

@ChrisH

How about a "simple" floppy controller written into the FPGA for the sam440/sam460, using the "whole track" linear read option the same as Gary and not the sector reading PC floppies normally do?

IIRC that is the magic difference allowing the full read/write that classic 68k Amiga machines use for 880/1.6MB formatted space.

@LiveForIt
Quote:
Unfortunately, the OS4 RAD drive is not a recoverable drive like it is for OS3. It's basically just a fixed size RAM drive for OS4.

@xenic

I don't understand way you can't, you can do a warm reboot.

CTRL+L.AMIGA+R.AMIGA = WARM REBOOT.
CTRL+L.ALT+R.ALT = COLD REBOOT (reboot to UBOOT/CFE).

It pretty useless anyway, we used use RAD drive unpack floppy's and boot of RAD, but this old AFFS images are not system friendly, beside or you run into other interesting problems. But who care when you have EUAE / RunInUAE for that kind of thing anyway.

On the X1000, you have CF card you might be able to abuse, for that too.

Maybe a better idea to make some changes to startup-sequence so that if some startup-2en file or some is in S: you boot of that instead.

Uboot also has some interning options to enable alternate boots, lets say you beta tester, and you have beta kickstart files and normal kickstart files, on the same computer. You think of that option as like rom switch on Amiga500 I guess, only can also set boot partition.

I member on reasons you wanted to boot differently on A1200 was to save RAM, but that is not really needed on X1000/Sam460/XE/SE/X5000.

what about RAID ???

@retro

There is a softraid.device driver, and not exactly related.

I do have a suggestion for HDToolbox(OS3)/Media Toolbox(OS4) to possibly work around RAID setups but requires extra consideration when partitioning.

I've been looking at open ZFS a little bit.

It appears usable for such things at least initially.
Anyone able to add an opinion as to whether it would be worth the time making it work including bootstrapping?