ArduinoFloppyDiskReader VS fs-uae

Also have a look at drawbridge which even supports live loading Amiga disks in an emulator. https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/

For more info: https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/

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.

This seems to be Rob's official site?

For the second case I recommend Rob Smith's DrawBridge (previously known as ArduinoFloppyDiskReader): https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ It's a simple arduino-based project, which allows you to use a regular PC floppy drive to write (and read) amiga disk images. You can make your own, or wait your turn for Rob to sell you one pre-assembled. I made my own and it works great.

Forget the a500 mini, it's not worth your time. You can use this cheap contraption to grab images of all your old floppy disks: https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ and just load them up on an emulator like fs-uae, winuae, or whatever, which you can run on any PC you like. The A500mini is just an ARM computer in an amiga-shaped box running the same emulator, without a keyboard, without giving you all the options the emulator can handle, and you have to pay for it... The point approaches 0 pretty fast.

FWIW, the WinUAE page has always been that minimalist.

UAE was the Unix Amiga Emulator and the original source is now dead, but was forked years ago and the two main versions are WinUAE (for Windows) and FS-UAE (for Linux, Windows and macOS).

FS-UAE has a website more like the one you're expecting: https://fs-uae.net/

...but the link here is to announce that WinUAE just got a new release, not to debate the relative merits of two competing forks of a project and their websites!

If it helps anyone, here's a simple how-to for setting up WinUAE: https://www.howtoretro.com/emulation/winuae-setup-amiga-emul...

https://fs-uae.net/ is pretty much the standard Amiga emulator on all platforms. You'll need to source the ROMs from the high seas.

FS-UAE is based on WinUAE and multi-platform (i have it installed on macos and linux). But it seems to be lagging behind with the latest update being from 2021. https://github.com/FrodeSolheim/fs-uae

Thanks for the suggestions. I did see someone write about a battery leaking in a different blog post on a restoration, but I didn't know the battery leak was so common. I'm going to look at it (and remove) now. If the battery has already leaked and damaged the motherboard then I'll likely try using UAE to mount the drive on a PC via SCSI. I'm not familiar with UAE -- I see a github repo for UAE at https://github.com/bernds/UAE and also these sites https://www.winuae.net/ and https://fs-uae.net/ .. would I be able to mount the HD using winuae? Or would you recommend linux with fs-uae, or some other flavor of UAE entirely?