Over the past month or so, I’ve resurrected my old Amiga 1200. I added a 2Gb SD card internally and set up a serial link to my PC.

I needed software, so I downloaded an archive of 1000(ish) Fred Fish disks. Fred Fish was someone who published floppy disks with curated pieces of software and they were a gold mine. I bought a few over my years at Uni, and the one with SB-Prolog got me through my second year resits.

I have a USB floppy drive converted to speak Amiga, but getting the software onto the floppy reliably and then getting it off reliably was a chancy affair.

I bought an external Gotek drive that plugs into the external floppy port of the Amiga This little box of tricks accepts a USB stick full of Amiga disk images and pretends to be a floppy drive with that disk in it.

So now I was moving disk images on a USB stick between my PC and the Amiga, and that started getting a bit old; far too physical.

There had to be a better way. I briefly thought about a direct USB connection, but my PC doesn’t do USB OTG, so Cursed Stick was born.

This is firmware for an ESP32 that pretends to be a USB stick to a device that pretends to be a floppy disk. Push ADF files to it over WiFi (either POST or via a web page) and they appear to the Amiga. The levels of indirection, and software stacked in a teetering pile means this has no right to work, but it does! As a Brucey Bonus, the ESP32 is powered from the Amiga. I’ve currently got a honking big dev board connected via a cable, but my ultimate aim is a small device with a USB-A socket on it.