Sony FA-P1 on Amiga

The Sony FA-P1 is an external PCMCIA drive for old PC laptops and actually developed by YE Data for Toshiba and Sony. This device is now coming to Amiga 1200 and 600 machines with a new driver.

These 2 photos show the work in progress with the drive able to read and write 1.44Mb floppy disks to and from the Amiga OS. 

Work on this has been in the background until I finally got the main pseudo DMA working. All code has been previously built for Linux, but without the official YE Data documentation it was hard to really understand how data transfers should work. 

Full testing still required and some additional code needed to format disks and switch between 720Kb and 1.44Mb. This drive also supports mode 3 1.2Mb formats, although I doubt there's much use for that format outside of Japan.

This isn't too revolutionary with the existing support for USB drives. The main objective is to extend devices that can use the PCMCIA port on the Amiga and think how this could have worked 25 years or more ago when PCMCIA was still new.

The drives appear now and again on ebay, but for some reason some sellers think they are still worth a fortune and keep prices artificially high.

Final drivers will appear on Aminet when ready!