Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

So I guess my remaining concern is converting those Amiga disks acquired from ebay into Amiga disk images. What is the best tool to do that on modern computers? USB is preferred.

The problem with Amiga disks is that they use a format that is not compatible with regular PC controllers.
There is a hack where you can use a HD floppy drive to read Amiga floppies, but your mileage may vary, using special software like Disk2FDI or adfread.
Alternatively you can use a specialized controller like a Catweasel or KryoFlux.
See here for more information:
https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-118

Scali wrote:

There is a hack where you can use a HD floppy drive to read Amiga floppies, but your mileage may vary, using special software like Disk2FDI or adfread.

https://youtu.be/GOp-_Tmo4TE
There seems to be another method, too. It uses a special cable with a stub to the LPT port:
http://disk2fdi.joguin.com/D2FCABLE.htm
Guess this saves one floppy drive ?

Scali wrote:

Alternatively you can use a specialized controller like a Catweasel or KryoFlux.
See here for more information:
https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-118

I heard about Catweasel once. It also was a host for the SID chip, wasn't it ?
I could be wrong, but I vaguely remember there were two versions out there.
One for PCI and an older one for ISA bus. I wonder, were there ever DOS/W3.1/Linux drivers for it ?

Edit: Found the seller's website - http://www.vesalia.de/e_catweaselmk4.htm

Amiga 500 or 2000 happened to be the first computer I ever used in my lifetime (around 3 or 4 years old in the early 1990s). Before that, my father once owned a Commodore 64 before me and my siblings were born. Ah yes, I remember the days of switching floppies and booting up the system for certain games. Definitely had awesome sound and graphics (at least in the 1980s) before the PCs certainly caught up.

First time I ever dealt with Commodore 64 was over an emulator as my father no longer had the real system. He still had games for it though (first time I really saw 5 1/4" floppies, like really floppy) like Bard's Tale. Commodore 64's BASIC interface is what inspired my virtual computer's DOS environment (very similar cursor and font design).

Arduino Amiga Floppy Disk Reader

http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/

badmojo wrote:

The SID is a different story though - there is a reproduction available that's supposed to be pretty good, but not 100%.

That's pretty wild. The thing's been decapped and fully dissected for a few years already, and incorporated into reSID. As the filter caps are external to the chip, I can't imagine it'd be *that* hard to stuff an emulation into the same sized package. Though I don't imagine the demand for said reproductions is so high, lots of folks are absolute sticklers for original chips.

SaxxonPike wrote:

That's pretty wild. The thing's been decapped and fully dissected for a few years already, and incorporated into reSID. As the filter caps are external to the chip, I can't imagine it'd be *that* hard to stuff an emulation into the same sized package. Though I don't imagine the demand for said reproductions is so high, lots of folks are absolute sticklers for original chips.

Of all the C64 chips it seems that the SID's the one that there would be a market for - from what I understand people are still making music with them, both in and out of a C64. But I dunno, maybe even a 100% accurate reproduction wouldn't interest the hardcore SID fans if their motivation is seeing what the original can do, as apposed to simply loving the sound of them.

You see them listed on eBay occasionally for decent prices (70 bucks +) but I don't know if they sell at that price - I've bought complete C64s for half that in recent years.

C64's used to be free around here forever since so many were made, prices seem to be going up now (they started dying?). Atari 8bit gear is rising too I think. I snagged all the 8 bit gear I wanted ages ago.

I think 100% repro would be fine (give jumper to choose either 6581 or 8580 variant).

the problem with recreating the SID, is parts of it are analogue! you cant just FPGA it up, which is why clones dont sound exact.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

So I guess my remaining concern is converting those Amiga disks acquired from ebay into Amiga disk images.

Make sure you only buy 100% tested and working disks. I blame the weird disk format as many original disks I have are now unreadable. 😵

BloodyCactus wrote:

the problem with recreating the SID, is parts of it are analogue! you cant just FPGA it up, which is why clones dont sound exact.

Even real SIDs don't sound exact. Especially with the 6581, production was not very consistent, so there can be quite significant differences in how they sound.
Which is why the ReSID software emulator doesn't just emulate the '6581' and '8580', but has a number of different sounding emulations.
Even so, ReSID does not quite manage to capture the magic of a real SID.
As soon as ReSID is perfected, you could build an FPGA with those routines (possibly allowing you to switch emulations on-the-fly). But currently the SID simply hasn't been emulated to perfection yet.

Scali wrote:

Even real SIDs don't sound exact. Especially with the 6581, production was not very consistent, so there can be quite significan […]
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BloodyCactus wrote:

the problem with recreating the SID, is parts of it are analogue! you cant just FPGA it up, which is why clones dont sound exact.

Even real SIDs don't sound exact. Especially with the 6581, production was not very consistent, so there can be quite significant differences in how they sound.
Which is why the ReSID software emulator doesn't just emulate the '6581' and '8580', but has a number of different sounding emulations.
Even so, ReSID does not quite manage to capture the magic of a real SID.
As soon as ReSID is perfected, you could build an FPGA with those routines (possibly allowing you to switch emulations on-the-fly). But currently the SID simply hasn't been emulated to perfection yet.

It gets tricky. I learned a lot while writing Bizhawk's C64 core.

The SID chip's output is only 12 bits. The waveform mixing and amplification stages are done in an analog fashion. It just sorta throws the top 12 bits from any of the waveform generators into the same bucket and lets the signals fight (the result is somewhat close to logical 'and', but it's not exactly that, nor is it predictable.)

The clock rate of the chip itself is 2mHz- most emulators just sample it at 44.1kHz instead of (expensively) rendering it at 2mHz and downsampling.

The wild differences in the manufactured 6581 chips ensures that not only do two chips not sound precisely the same, but emulation will sound like nobody else's, even if it *was* perfect.

The sound itself is also smoothed out- flipping signals on and off at 2mHz and sending them down a long signal path doesn't result in a perfect sound on the other end.

I imagine the emulators we have now are a result of what would happen "ideally" assuming the electronic components worked perfectly without tolerance. So, reproducing the "magic" so to speak would involve also introducing these kinds of impurities into the signal. I think this is doable. I also think people don't care enough to make it feasible to produce at a profit 😀 Even if it was good enough to fool people in double blind tests.

I forgot about this thread...

shamino wrote:

I agree that it's hard for a bunch of small game developers and joystick manufacturers to get together on something like this, but I think the computer manufacturers should have done it themselves while launching their systems. Seems to me it would have been a selling point, especially for gaming computers. As you mentioned, there were certainly ways to expand the buttons without breaking 1 button compatibility.

Atari and Sega both expanded to 2 buttons eventually, but using slightly different methods. Both methods were compatible with the 1 button standard, which allowed those to still be useful for games that didn't need the 2nd button.
I wish Commodore had done this for the C64 at the time of system launch. I also wish Atari had done it a lot earlier than they did.

They could have, but they would have had to make the joysticks themselves at first because I doubt any third party would produce joysticks for a system that hadn't even been launched yet. You can't have software on the market that requires two buttons and not have a two-button joystick ready to go. And if they had done that, people would have complained about having to replace their Atari compatible joysticks with new ones for this new machine. It would have taken a while for other companies to jump on the bandwagon and start making two-button joysticks for it.

shamino wrote:

Didn't the C64 launch in 1982? By that time they should have been defining 2+ buttons IMO, especially given it's gaming capability. I guess Commodore didn't make their own joysticks..

Actually, they produced two joysticks to go with the VIC-20. The first was an exact clone of the standard Atari joystick, just with a white top on the case. The second was structurally similar, but it had a rectangular base, a triangular stick and an oval fire button centered in front of the stick. I never used the 2600 clone one, but I have one of the second model and it sucks. I seem to recall that most people didn't like it.

I guess by the time the C64 was released they decided that it wasn't worth making their own joysticks when people could just use third party ones.

BTW, they also made a set of paddle controllers that were identical to the Atari ones except for half-white cases as well. Supposedly they were actually better quality than the Atari ones and gave a smoother response on the C64, although I never had any problem using Atari paddles in the few games that supported them, like Arkanoid and Pinball Spectacular.

BloodyCactus wrote:

fs-uae > win-uae. by miles.

Maybe better features, but ugly UI in the launcher!

WinUAE has much better support for mounting real removable hard drives as Amiga disks, formatting and preparing them so it wins by default.

I love my Commodore,i have several games on it 😀