13 Jun
2010
13 Jun
'10
5:08 p.m.
On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Al Hartman <alhartman at yahoo.com> wrote:
I recently picked up an Amiga 500 on eBay. I may have
some Workbench disks that will work with it.
In case I don't. Does anyone have advice on how I can get disk images and make
floppies from them readable by the A500?
I have PC's and Macs with floppy drives available to make the disks.
It's a classic chicken or egg problem. I had the same problem with an
Apple 2e. There's a lot of good software out there for the amiga that
transfers files over either the serial or parallel port. If you have
a null modem serial cable handy, you can use regular old terminal
software to transfer disk images. Once those are over, you can write
the images to a blank floppy using the amiga floppy drive. There's
also software that allows you to create a tcp/ip connection to another
computer over the parallel port.
As for getting things into the machine to begin with, the amiga floppy
drive is capable of reading 720k formatted PC floppy disks. That
would be useful for transfering individual lha or zoo files over to
the amiga. There are high density drives available for the amiga, but
they're rare and expensive. Figure $100 or so. If you're good with
hardware, there's also a way to hack PC floppy drives to work in the
amiga. I'm not sure if they would act like double density or high
density drives though.
Having said that, the catweasel really is the easiest way. But it's
not cheap. You download whatever disk images you want and simply
write them to a floppy using a garden variety 1.44mb floppy drive.
You'd be able to write a lot of other disks as well including atari
and c64 (but not apple 2e. :-/ )
Of all the amiga machines, the 500 and 1000 are the hardest to
upgrade. IDE and SCSI interfaces are expensive and rare. The 1200
for example has an ide interface right on the motherboard. All you
need is a cheap IDE to CF converter. Then you can put the CF card in
a PC and use WinUAE to mount the CF card as a hard drive and install
the OS and whatever you want, then put the CF card the 1200 and boot.
This technique would work for the 500 as well, but you need an IDE
controller. AmigaKit also sells a PCMCIA solution for transferring
files from a PC, but again, this is 600/1200 only.
If you had a 2000, things are much easier. SCSI boards for the 2000
are a dime a dozen, and they'd likely come with a hard drive that has
everything you need already on it. You could use the IDE to CF route
with that as well if you get a SCSI to IDE converter. Sounds like a
hack, but it works. In this case, you could attach the amiga scsi
drive to a scsi controller in a PC, then mount the drive in WinUAE and
copy whatever you want. With a 2000, you could also get a buddha
board and use the IDE to CF adapter. That works great. This also
works on the 500 if you can find a slingshot board. Again, these are
rare, but from a technical standpoint, they're ridiculously easy to
implement. You might want to see if you can talk someone like jim
brain into making a batch of these. They'd be inexpensive and sell
like hotcakes. I'd take one as well. :-)
I seem to remember there also being someone from india or turkey or
something who sells a doodad on ebay that allows the PC to pretend
it's an amiga floppy drive. In that scenario, you'd run some software
on the PC to mount an ADF image and just copy the files over to the
floppy in the amiga. I haven't tried this.
brian