Greaseweazle v4 with dual QL 3.5" drives - possible?

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Sparrowhawk
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Re: Greaseweazle v4 with dual QL 3.5" drives - possible?

Post by Sparrowhawk »

It worked! :)

Oddly, none of the disks scanned on drive 1, but worked perfectly on drive 2. This is the reverse of what I find when plugged into on my QL, where drive 1 is always more reliable.

To forestall any queries: no, my dissertation was not worth the effort! But the process itself was quite fun.

In the end I had to buy the Value Edition of Amiga Forever to get legal 1.3 ROMs/Kickstart. After converting the dissertation disks and the Protext word processor disk, I managed to get the documents to show in the emulator. I'd planned to then work out how to get them from Protext out onto the host machine, but frankly, my musings on french industrial policy from the mid 1970s to the late 1980s are probably best left hidden for now.

Initially I thought the dissertation disks had failed, as although they completed the Greaseweazle extraction without error, when mounted in Amiga Forever they showed as empty. However, when catalogued from within Protext, all the files were there and readable.

So in conclusion:
  • Greaseweazle is a rather awesome piece of hardware/software
  • I'd forgotten just how good Protext was.
  • I'm going to have some fun playing with an (emulated) Amiga after 30+ years
  • things you wrote over 35 years ago are rarely as interesting as you think they are


a.k.a. Jean-Yves
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Chr$
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Re: Greaseweazle v4 with dual QL 3.5" drives - possible?

Post by Chr$ »

Sparrowhawk wrote: Wed Oct 04, 2023 12:07 pm It worked! :)

Oddly, none of the disks scanned on drive 1, but worked perfectly on drive 2. This is the reverse of what I find when plugged into on my QL, where drive 1 is always more reliable.

To forestall any queries: no, my dissertation was not worth the effort! But the process itself was quite fun.

In the end I had to buy the Value Edition of Amiga Forever to get legal 1.3 ROMs/Kickstart. After converting the dissertation disks and the Protext word processor disk, I managed to get the documents to show in the emulator. I'd planned to then work out how to get them from Protext out onto the host machine, but frankly, my musings on french industrial policy from the mid 1970s to the late 1980s are probably best left hidden for now.

Initially I thought the dissertation disks had failed, as although they completed the Greaseweazle extraction without error, when mounted in Amiga Forever they showed as empty. However, when catalogued from within Protext, all the files were there and readable.

So in conclusion:
  • Greaseweazle is a rather awesome piece of hardware/software
  • I'd forgotten just how good Protext was.
  • I'm going to have some fun playing with an (emulated) Amiga after 30+ years
  • things you wrote over 35 years ago are rarely as interesting as you think they are
To bring this back up, although not entirely on the original Amiga topic.... did you also use the Greaseweazle to dump QL formatted disks? If so, I'd be interested to hear what the appropriate settings were etc as I'm just about to try it.


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Collector of QL related computers, accessories and QL games/software.
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Sparrowhawk
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Re: Greaseweazle v4 with dual QL 3.5" drives - possible?

Post by Sparrowhawk »

I’m afraid not, just Amiga so far.

If you do figure it out though, i’d be interested to know.


a.k.a. Jean-Yves
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Re: Greaseweazle v4 with dual QL 3.5" drives - possible?

Post by Chr$ »

Will do. I know I can do it with SamDisk (and an PC with FDD controller) but as I have the Greaseweazle setup I'll see if there is a way using that as an alternative.


https://QXL.WIN
Collector of QL related computers, accessories and QL games/software.
Ask me about felt pads - I can cut them to size and they have proved excellent for mdv data recovery.
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Re: Greaseweazle v4 with dual QL 3.5" drives - possible?

Post by Chr$ »

It's easier than I thought for 720k disks, you just set the argument to --format ibm.720 and the destination to an .img file, so something like:

D:\gw.exe" read --device=COM5 --drive=1 --format ibm.720 "D:\filename.img

The resultant .img files work fine in qemulator. I haven't got it to work for 1.44mb QL disks (i.e. those created by GC or SGC equipped QLs) yet, but that's not really an issue, as I don't think any original QL software came on HDD disks.


https://QXL.WIN
Collector of QL related computers, accessories and QL games/software.
Ask me about felt pads - I can cut them to size and they have proved excellent for mdv data recovery.
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Re: Greaseweazle v4 with dual QL 3.5" drives - possible?

Post by Sparrowhawk »

Oh that's great. Thanks for letting us know.


a.k.a. Jean-Yves
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