Greaseweazle V4 on AmigaOS 4.x?

Hi everyone,

Found the following item for sale at AmigaKit:

Read and write Amiga format floppy disks using a PC or Mac !

Plug a floppy disk drive into Greaseweazle and then connect it to a USB port. Use the software to read or write an Amiga format floppy disk - it even supports ADF files.

This adapter is great for backing up Amiga floppies to image files.

Greaseweazle allows versatile floppy drive control over USB. By extracting the raw flux transitions from a drive, any disk format can be captured and analysed - PC, Amiga, Amstrad, PDP-11, musical instruments, industrial equipment, and more. The Greaseweazle also supports writing to floppy disks, from a range of image file formats including those commonly used for online preservation (ADF, IPF, DSK, IMG, HFE, ...).)

https://amigakit.amiga.store/greaseweazle-p-91279.html

Back in 2021 AmigaKit wrote about doing some investigations concerning getting this to work on AmigaOS 4. Anyone knows if they've done any progress?

https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=75366.0

Personally I'd love to see the Greaseweazle supported on AmigaOS 4. Anyone else interested in this?

@AmigaOldskooler

Quote:
My best guess is that if there was any notable progress, it would be publicized quite loudly around here, Amigans.net being the forum for OS4 users (and thus a natural place to reach customers).

Any update on this support? If any dev wants to commit to making it work, PM me and I'll buy you one.

Cheers,
Bill "tekmage" Borsari

@AmigaOldskooler

It will never be fast, it uses serial protocol as communication, at least that’s what I remember when talked to the hardware developers, they did not want any help with the drivers, but streaming and buffering can be done, to hide the slowness.
(They seemed uninterested in AmigaOS4.)

@LiveForIt

Then they don't seem interested in the Amiga either. What about Amiga users with USB ports? There's plenty of Amigas with USB ports. This could be a way to have a HD drive. Plus it also puts Mac users out.

Anyway serial shouldn't slow it down. As USB is serial. It should be using the fast USB transfer for any serial as it's built in.

But while a 68K, OS4 and Mac/Linux driver could be written, I don't think that's the way to go. If possible a generic solution would be best. The USB floppy protocol allows for variable geometry so I think coding it to the USB standard would be best and allow it to work on all platforms without proprietary drivers. As it stands right now it's locked to being a Windows only product that really needs an Amiga emulator to work.

I took a look at the code on GitHub (https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/tree/master/). That code base is written in Python 3.8, so I can understand why they would not want to maintain a Python 2.5 target along with all the libraries our native OS4 Python does not support.

What I'm thinking now is that I'll stick an RPI in my case, have the PI talk to the Greaseweasle, and build a Hollywood GUI to send commands to the PI to work with the floppy. Should not be all that hard to create something that detects a floppy insert and automates the process to have that floppy popup on the workbench :)

Cheers,
Bill "tekmage" Borsari