Amiga Explorer Serial Number

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Ok, before we get all over-protective here - I was looking at the 16Mhz demo thread (which has gone way off topic, but still interesting) and somebody mentioned the Amiga Explorer which runs on Windows.
It connects to an Amiga over serial or TCP/IP connection and using a Windows 'Explorer' like interface, it's possible to drag and drop disk images over an icon that represents the floppy drive in the Amiga itself.
The image is streamed over the serial or TCP/IP connection and written to the disk in the Amiga's drive.
It gets over all the Windows issues with writing images to disks by virtue of the fact that the receiving software on the Amiga is controlling the floppy write process based on the data it is receiving over the stream.
On the back of this, I have been in touch with the developers to ask if there could be an opportunity to extend what they have to support Atari machines too.
Within a couple of hours, I had a response from the developers of Amiga Explorer and it looks positive. Here's the response in full:
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Dear Darren,
Thank you for your interest and mail. I would say yes, that would be interesting, if some reputable Atari contributors could be found. On the other hand there is so little coming in from Amiga Explorer to us, that we would need some form of semi-volunteer contribution. First however we have a small bounty for whoever is willing to take on this set of improvements:
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We have a small bounty for a set of four enhancements to Amiga Explorer, which are not new features, but top the list of fixes requested by users (including ourselves, and maybe yourselves):
- Replace buggy low-level handhsaking/resyncing/error handling with time-proven and well-documented component (e.g. as in X or ZModem)
- In serial mode, work with three wires if 7 wires are not available
- Support 64 bit (>4 GB) volume and file sizes
- In TCP/IP, see if possible to do without some functions not implemented in all stacks (e.g. asynchronous socket events)
This is in order of priority, and the top three are the most important, especially the first one (what a mistake we made, in not using some tested code in the first place!). Right now the user experience with Amiga Explorer is quite good if you have a good cable, and bad if you have a less good cable (that still works perfectly well for the user with X/ZModem and a terminal program).
In theory, there is another underlying issue in Amiga Explorer that seems to be more tolerated by users, but which is a known problem. There is a combination of sends and receives in different places, and filesystem waits, which adds deadlock conditions on top of the bad communications. However, these are normally resolved after a timeout, and Windows Explorer itself does the same in many ways (e.g. you have to wait a long time before it gets responsive again after trying to open a bad floppy in A: ), so it's not the most directly perceived problem by users. The developer working on the low-level handhsaking/resyncing/error handling will however inevitably notice this, and may wonder whether it is best to put some order first. But for us, it is not a requirement right now.
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As this involves a change in the protocol, I think it should best be done before considering opening up the interface to other platforms.
Regards,
Michael
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So, aside from some Windows and transport issues that they are working on, it seems pretty stable.
Amiga Explorer is about $15 (so that's roughly £7.50 for UK). So you get the idea what the price would be to end users. I think this is excellent value for money if it can do on the Atari what it does on the Amiga and would save a lot of grief that people have in recreating floppies for running stuff on real hardware - especially those without mass storage or the newbies.
First of all, is this something that interests the Atari community in general?
Secondly, I'd like to know who would seriously be up for this bearing in mind this would be voluntary work?
I'm no 68000 coder, just a Windows/Mac coder so all I can do at best is set up the connections between the right people.
Your thoughts would be very welcome..