So I first got this idea in my head when I was watching a review of the Mister Multisystem 2 (review of the system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e-k9I94JLs ), as a little extra feature they showed off an NFC (Near Field Communicator) device that you could then place inside the unit and then have NFC chip assigned to a game, so when the user would place that next to the device it would load up the game.
So I kinda thought what about putting a NFC reader inside a floppy disk drive and putting the chip in a floppy disk, so when the user (me) put in a disk with AmigaOS4 on it, it would load up AmigaOS4.
So how and what is need to get this done? Well first setup the parts, first a NFC read/writer is required, a PN532 USB is the best and easiest one to work with, you can get them for around £20 on Amazon, Ebay or Aliexpress.
Next some NFC stickers/cards what ever you want to use, again can easily bought, and then the software Zaparoo, https://zaparoo.org/
It supports a number of platforms and system, Linux, Windows, Android, MisterFPGA, Pi system, SteamOs etc. and has been designed for this purpose of launching games and emulators with NFC cards.
Its fairly easy to setup, one useful feature is you can write custom codes and launch pretty much anything you can think of if you want to, it all explained in the Zaparoo Docs.
I could have made it just open UAE Config files, but I decided, I wouldn’t mind hearing the noise as if the floppy disk drive was being activated and maybe a nice start-up logo to each config, so as I know a little bit of Hollywood coding, I thought I make these little programs in that,
Above pic show the extra code you need to add to Zaparoo Config.toml file
Pic2 show the value code that is read on NFC chip, the **launch “C:\WinUAE\AmigaOS5.exe” this is code you need to write to the NFC, when you go into the Create part of the program.
Pic3 show the simple Hollywood program, load up the box art, play floppy disk sound, trigger WinUAE load config.
Thats is pretty much it, so now I’m building a system that has Pimiga, AGS, Amiga Vision, Amikit, Aros, AmigaOS3.2, AmigaOS4 distros all on the one machine each accessible by just a floppy disk and I don’t have to see the emulator and make it feel I’m loading into this OS distros. So course it doesn’t have to load into complete distro it can also be just a game or website or anything you can pretty much think you want triggered by NFC tag.
I want to thank Zaparoo team for there work on this and scrappysphinx from Amibay that supplied the dead floppy disk drive for me to use.