Markus Hohmann, George Bachaelor, Piotr Bugaj and those of you in the CPC retro scene that have pointed me to the many projects that are still ongoing today to keep the retro dream alive! Facebook GroupĮnough of the pre-amble, this article will show you how to configure a GreaseWeazle to work on macOS, connecting an Amstrad CPC 3″ External Disk Drive, reading, converting and using your encoded disks in an Emulator (I prefer to use JavaCPC). Keir Fraser, Ant Goffart for producing the GreaseWeazleĪndrew Philips-Martin, Tom Dalby, Krasimir Hristov, Vasyl Samoilov, Denis Lechevalier The Retro community are friendly, vibrant, knowledgeable and helpful, I find that those who develop projects such as this also provide amazing support and I have to acknowledge thank you to the following :. As such it makes it perfect for making digital forensic copies of disks in the past. Via the Retro community I learned of the GreaseWeazle, and at a fundamental level it works by recording the magnetic fluctuations on the disk surface and therefore doesn’t rely on a specific disk interface to decode those signals. It also meant that 30+ years later I was unable to preserve accurately the data on the disks due to the protection system still being valid today! This worked well as a proof of concept and made it’s way onto commercial educational titles. There are some disks that I encoded using a Disk Protection system I created in the 80’s and 90’s which meant that standard hardware was unable to accurately duplicate the disk and therefore fail the anti-piracy checks.
I’ve been transferring my data originally using a USB Floppy Emulator from Zaxon (which I will cover in a separate blog entry because this gadget covers a much different use case scenario).