Making Amiga Disks

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 5:15 PM, Al Hartman <alhartman at yahoo.com> wrote: If you want to run older software and don't have an autobooting hard drive, Kickstart 1.2 is fine, but you might want AmigaDOS 1.3 instead of 1.2 (there are some other minor improvements). If you have an Autobooting hard drive (Commodore A590, for example), you'll need Kickstart 1.3. I have an old Stardrive on a Starboard memory expansion for my A1000 - it does _not_ autoboot - I have to boot from a special floppy that has the Stardrive driver and other important files (mountlists, for example) that repoints all the important system logicals to directories on the hard disk after all the setup stuff is done. For that, either Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 works. If you don't care to run really old games and such and don't have a fondness for the old black/white/blue/orange Workbench color scheme, Kickstart 2.04 and some newer flavor of AmigaDOS is nice (and still should let you run most older programs, too, unless they are heavily copy-protected direct-floppy-boot games that depend on specific ROM contents). A SCSI ZIP drive should just work as well as any other SCSI disk - it's dependent on what adapter you have as to what you have to do PC parallel ports are very different from Amiga parallel ports (for a variety of technical reasons). I did google this: http://aminet.net/package/docs/hard/ppazip - but that's for a parallel-port ZIP drive, not an Adaptec SCSI adapter. There are likely to be very few parallel port device drivers for PC hardware on an Amiga. I tried long ago to get official information on how the Xircom "pocket adapter" NICs talk to the PC parallel port and Xircom declined to provide details because they "didn't want to get into that market". For the A500, there are SCSI and IDE interfaces, internal (in the 68000 socket) and external (SOTS), but finding one these days is likely to be challenging. I think the majority of A500s were bought with floppies-only and stayed floppies-only their entire lives (though it was ordinary to have an external floppy drive if you didn't have a hard disk - it's difficult to use an Amiga with only one drive). -ethan