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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

Just yesterday I was talking with the parents of friends, who have held onto the floppy discs that their children stored the music and art they created on an Amiga. I'm not sure if these are 5.25 or 3.5 inch discs. If I can dd these discs, is there any way to recover the data in the files, and to convert to modern file formats? Might the audio already be in wav?

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The standard PC floppy drive (if you can still find one of those) is technically incapable of reading Amiga disks because the method to encode bits is different, and the PC floppy drive does the decoding in hardware before the software gets access to it. The Amiga floppy drive just sent the raw data to the computer, and the software would pass it through some dedicated hardware to decode it, but the software had the option of doing the decoding differently, which is why the Amiga can read PC floppies but not the other way around.

Third-party floppy drives with the raw data access such as greaseweazle can access Amiga floppy disks.

Then you need to decode the filesystem. There are tools for that.

Once you have the files, it is likely that the music will be in MOD format. The music player mikmod will play these quite happily. Sampled sound will likely be in IFF or WAV format, and most sensible sound apps should be able to load these. The images are likely to be in IFF format, and something like GIMP should be able to load them.

>The standard PC floppy drive (if you can still find one of those) is technically incapable of reading Amiga disks because the method to encode bits is different, and the PC floppy drive does the decoding in hardware before the software gets access to it.

This is accurate except it's not the drive, but the controller (in the PC's motherboard).

Most of these drives can be directly used with an Amiga, while all of them can be used with a GreaseWeazle

>Third-party floppy drives with the raw data access such as greaseweazle can access Amiga floppy disks.

I own one of these and absolutely recommend it.

They will be 3.5" DD disks but they won't be readable by a standard usb floppy drive.

Using a Greaseweazle[1] you can create an .adf image of the disks then using xdftool[2] or amigaexplorer[3] you'd be able to copy the files out of the disk image.

Images will likely be .IFF files which I think you can still open with irfanview and gimp, the music files will most likely be some tracker format. There is software to play tracker files but I don't know about that myself.

[1]https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle

[2]https://amitools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tools/xdftool.html

[3]https://www.amigaforever.com/ae/

VLC can play MOD. files quite reasonably. There is also a cross platform modern clone of ProTracker 2 available : https://github.com/8bitbubsy/pt2-clone

While PC floppy drives are mechanically the same as Amiga floppy drives, the controller that is attached to the drive is different. The controller used in PCs can't handle the stream coming from Amiga disks. The first thing I would do is preserve those disks by creating an image with a custom controller. I am positive that the music and art can be converted, but that can be done later. First, save (image) those disks!

Here are some tips to read Amiga floppy disks: https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-118

You will probably be able to see the files on the Amiga. The hard part will be transferring the files off the Amiga.

Gotek in external drive enclosure + usb thumb drive is what I used.

A serial cable will also do. ("Nullmodem".)

You can convert a cheap USB floppy drive into one that reads Amiga disks using a Drawbridge from https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ - I've done this and it works. Notice Amiga Forever 10 adds direct support for this setup, so the emulator can read from that drive plugged into your PC.

> I'm not sure if these are 5.25 or 3.5 inch discs.

Very likely 3"1/2 inches disks although most of my Amiga disks, which I still have, are 5"1/4 (5"1/4 were way cheaper than 3"1/2 so we'd mod our Amiga by adding an external 5" 1/4 drive and then we'd buy the much cheaper 5" 1/4 floppies).

Now... After all these years several of these floppies may not be fully readable anymore so don't wait too long before ripping them. My C64 5"1/4 started failing badly. I'd say maybe 2/3rd of them are still readable without errors. Haven't tried reading my Amiga floppies yet.

And I don't know if the 3"1/2 age better than the 5"1/4 or not.

But they'll eventually start failing.

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