Finally got around to play around with Greaseweazle, and wish I had done it a long time ago! Greaseweazle is a tool to read and write raw data from many different systems. Want to read a CoCo disk, or write a new Amiga disk? I haven’t tried it, but it supposedly can even deal with 8" disks (if you have the drive and interface) as well. My hardware setup was kind of a mess (as you can see from the picture!) but I’ll be cleaning that up over time with a smaller power supply and some kind of enclosure. Below are some pictures of it in use:

I used it to archive my first piece of software, one I had posted about earlier - a Star Trek themed organizer software named Stardate. Find it over at the Internet Archive.

If you have been on the fence about getting a Greaseweazle, I’d highly recommend it. I feel like the ability to read and write disks from many different retro systems will be very valuable going forward, not to mention the ability to perform real preservation.

  • @tsl
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    31 year ago

    That is really good - I have recently setup something similar with a Cypress CY8CKIT-059 development board and I have to say it almost brought tears to my eyes when I started read data from my old floppy disks on my Steam Deck…

    • @snowbell@beehaw.org
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      31 year ago

      Ooh, this makes me think about how great a steam deck would be for debugging my microcontroller projects.