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About
Arjuna is a solution to access floppy disks in any format. The standard floppy controller can not be used for this job. It can only read and write IBM floppy disks and refuses to access formats that differ from this standard due to hardware limitations. The Catweasel Controller is used to circumvent the built-in floppy controller. It's a ISA/PCI card produced by Individual Computers. It reads and writes the raw data from the media, which enables the software to access any format.Arjuna aims to support any format and filesystem for floppy disks. This is very ambitious, because there's so many of them. Arjuna meets this problem with it's modular concept. The complete functionality is implemented as plugins. This means the project is easily expandable. The plugins don't provide one big block of code to do the complete job of interpreting a format or a filesystem at once. Instead the tasks are split up in small pieces, which are called modules. They are connected in a graphical editor to perform a complex task together. This has several advantages over a fixed implementation of the functionality. The same modules can be combined in many different ways to fit several different problems. Furthermore already existing functions do not have to be implemented again to perform a new task. This way the user can take much influence on the way data from a media is interpreted. This is the most significant difference to already existing tools. All of them provide only a very limited set of formats, filesystems and tasks to perform on them. Arjuna gives free control instead!
Arjuna started as a dissertation at the University of Applied Sciences Cologne. Now that I'm finished with college I continue the project in my free time. It is written in C++ and uses the non-commarcial version of QT for the GUI. At the moment Linux and Windows are supported. It is published under the GPL license.