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Comment by vardump | Hacker News Reader

Would be pretty cool to get this working on a bit-banging monster, like RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico).

Just a few bucks and sports a 12 Mbit/s USB interface (and wifi for pico-w).

Take a look at the Greaseweazle https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle to see what a really high-end solution in this space looks like. It's intended as a from scratch alternative to the better-known KryoFlux.

The Greaseweazle V4, using the FluxEngine GUI, allowed me to capture 1,900 Amiga 880K disks in a row. Each disk took 50 seconds under ideal conditions. I absolutely recommend both for homogeneous collections of disks.

Most of the effort was in entering the text of the labels manually or restarting and switching between capture formats when a Mac or IBM disk cropped up. FluxEngine uses the expected format to decide whether the track most recently read contains errors; and if so, re-read the track 3-5 times, quintupling overall read-times.

All that's needed now is a floppy handling robot, a macro for recording the physical disk and label descriptions, and maybe a container format for all the capture products; thumbnails, cover art, metadata, flux images; that emulators and disk utilities can read, and that the community can re-distribute easily.

Nice, you should consider uploading these dumps to the Internet Archive so that they can be preserved for the foreseeable future. (Of course, that is unless they're strictly private data that was never made available, even unofficially.)

Been using it for some years, but I've had a lot of "heisendisks"; Greaseweazle gives a different image every time.

Still need a lot of work on my pile of old Amiga disks.

Upvote for greaseweazle (software and physical hardware). Also, the retro option is the Copy II PC Deluxe Option board when used with Copy II PC Deluxe.

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