Want to read old Amiga floppy disks? New PCB designs for Drawbridge and Greaseweazel builds

The Amiga was pretty clever. If you stuck an IBM PC floppy in the disk drive, then you could read it using software like CrossDOS. However, If you’ve ever tried using an Amiga Floppy in a PC disk drive, you’ll have seen that there’s no way of reading them due to the way the Amiga wrote to the disk.

If you’ve a bunch of Amiga floppies lying around that you want to convert or backup to a modern format then, you’d usually have to find another solution, that didn’t involve the floppy.

There has been various ways to get round this over the years such as Catweasel / Greaseweazle. Or the Armiga project from 2014.

The most recent device was the Amiga Drawbridge in 2021, created by Robert Smith.

Tebl on Github has created some fancy PCB’s which can be used for your Drawbridge or Greaseweazel builds, which look like a floppy disk. He says, “I started this project, completely fascinated by the recent articles written by Rob Smith for Amiga Addict magazine, detailing his solution for reading and writing Amiga floppy disks using an Arduino. I decided to look into low-cost implementation of his solution, as well as look into the other well known solution – the Greaseweazle. While there are certainly more professional options available, KryoFlux comes to mind, I like the idea of having low-cost solutions available – making personal disk backups a fun little diversion as opposed to a museum-grade investment.”

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