Hello from the Sunny North (!)
 

Hey all,

Greetings from the North West, hey to anyone local to Preston / Blackpool

I was fascinated by the Amiga when I was younger. As a teenager I had an A500 Screen Gems for a number of years, I spent many an hour watching demos and I long had ambitions to learn how to program it. I planned to learn C, whilst my friend focused on AMOS, but at the time the library in my home town had little in the way of computer literature, IT education at my school was less than stellar, we had no modem for BBS access and local computer clubs were little more than copy parties.

For my 18th I got an A1200 with HD just prior to shipping off to University; which saw me through my first year, but I rapidly discovered that an Amiga unfortunately wasn't going to cut it on an engineering degree - just as Escom took ownership of Commodore / Amiga and went belly up - the Amiga was boxed up and put into storage.

Now with a few years of software development and computer graphics experience behind me I'm keen to revisit my youth and see what I can now coerce the Amiga to do, probably starting in WinUAE initially until I can figure out the best way of transferring between the PC and A1200. Advice on approaches to deal with this gratefully accepted, or ways to capture my physical disks to an emulator friendly format. (are either the Supercard Pro or Kryoflux worth the effort / expenditure ?)

In between dipping into my favourite games from back-in-the-day (Turrican II, Alien Breed, Cannon Fodder) you're most likely to see me trawling ebay for bargains, or lurking around the coding and graphics forums; as a starter if anyone is familiar with Imagine 2, and any means of converting 3dsmax models to .iob format give me a shout.

See you around :great

Mike

Hi Mike, welcome to the forum :p

Can't help with the PC <-> Amiga issue, since i use ONLY emulation since 2002

But surely other members here will help you :agree

Welcome, Pixelfill! I am a long-time Amiga fan (A500 and A1200 with HDD) and I LUUUURVE Demos! I have a very large collection on WinUAE as of now!

Welcome...

Welcome Pixelfill ,im kinda local to you , Blackburn :D

Thanks for the welcome guys.

Hey zubidoo the weather's been nice up here recently hasn't it lol, are there many more of us up here? drowning in the recent downpours.

Heya Pixelfill,

Welcome to EAB :great

I was actually near Preston visiting my friend at the end of September who works for RNLI managing the station and skippers the lifeboats.

Well he's actually in Lytham St Annes but close enough.

Yeah it's a bit wet around here to lol, go shopping in the old dingy :D
I know there at least 1 more user from Blackburn ive seen and another from accrington, probably a few others no doubt.


Always good to see another local amiga fan appear :)

Welcome to the forum!

Well, I have recently found my NOS DLink DFE-670TXD 16bit PCMCIA ethernet cards. These are dongleless so all you need is the card! I opened one box (all still in the cellophane wrapping) and gave it a whirl on my A600. It works great! I can now access the internet (FTP servers and you can browse website if you have enough processing power and RAM), transfer via TCP/IP to and from Amiga to my PC (which is significantly faster than serial). In fact, if you look up "Amiga Explorer" you can see what it can offer in terms of copying files, hard drive images but also transferring and creating ADFs (the common Amiga standard for floppy disks per say).

I plan to sell the other 2 PCMCIA in due course, but looking at prices on eBay for Amiga compatible PCMCIA Ethernet cards, they are selling for nearly as much as I bought them many years ago... and they're used stock, whereas mine is brand new and untouched :)

Unless you have copy protected disks, the above will suffice for all your needs, but if you wish to make copy protected backups, the difficult comes in that you can create a image of the disk using Supercard Pro / KryoFlux but the image cannot be written back to another disk without some manipulation (this is why IPFs or the like are created using the KryoFlux images).

Anyways, happy to help out if I can if you want to give me a shout.

Greetings also from the NW England Sunny Southport

I find the easiest way is via a PCMCIA SD Card reader
Or you if you have patience via a serial cable
Or install a CF Card as a HDD and oull it out and read it with WinUae

That's one heck of a hike from Sydney :D

Very noble activity the RNLI, I have much respect for him and what he does. With the greatest of respect I hope I never have cause to meet him in his professional capacity.

Mike

Thanks for the heads up, do you need to add some form of TCP/IP stack or does Workbench (3.1) include the necessary drivers?

Is it not possible to duplicate the disks with either the SuperCard, or Kryoflux then. Definitely seems like too much effort, if I can't use the images to restore a physical copy in the event of failure.


Yay, pretty soon us Northerners will be taking over hehe

You need to add this manually unfortunately. AmiTCP 3.0 is free. It works for the most part but if you want to use Amiga Explorer then you need version 4.0 or above (not free). I could make a boot disk to automatically load the drivers on boot...



As far as I know you can't. I haven't been able to write back directly without the disk not working. IPFs are refined so they work when written back. @dlfrsilver is the best person for advice on this as he's worked his magic on creating IPFs.