At 11:25 AM -0700 6/13/10, Al Hartman wrote: Off the top of my head, I think you'll need a Catweasel board to put in a PC. Having just an A500 makes it more than a little difficult. I'm still trying to find my A500, so I can see if I can get it working again. I've found the A3000, but not its keyboard. :-( Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Al Hartman <alhartman at yahoo.com> wrote: 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