IDE can not copy that floppy

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A level under development for the Skullspace_Hardware_Programming_Challenge.

• Platform: Amiga 2000 (on loan)
• IO: Amiga floppy drive ( not IDE
• Level master: Mark Jenkins
• Difficulty: hard

You can not copy the secret floppy on your PC IDE floppy drive. MUAHAHAHAHAH!

IDE (integrated drive electronics) puts a lot of intelligence about how these floppies are formated on a low level into the hardware itself. The Amiga floppy had no such frills, various low levels aspects of the hardware like rotation speed, position of read head, and spacing of bits could be controlled by the Amiga itself.

Your mission is to decode the secret message on a specially formated floppy for this challenge. You can output the result on-screen or over the serial port.

This level is still under development, we haven't actually created a secret floppy yet or the proof of concept program.

Working Development Tools

• m68k C compiler -- GCC
• m68k assembler -- Binutils

These need to be tested.

Tools needing further development

• A simple bootloader to load a user provided program over RS-232 serial

Working Documentation

• There's considerable documentation on the web for Amiga hardware programming

Documentation needing development

• Guide for building GCC and binutils as suitable cross compilers
• perhaps a summary guide should be written specific to the relevant devices
• Should document the state of the machine after the Amiga ROM has done its thing and after the bootloader has operated.