Reading adf's from floppydrive in WinUAE
 

Hi all fellow amiga-worshippers in here! :bowdown
This is my first post in here and it's regarding WinUAE.
I was wondering whether the following technique for reading adf-files in winUAE was possible.
I just bought a USB floppy drive because I missed the whole disk swapping thing when playing games in WinUAE. I'm planning to buy a shitload of windows floppies and just copy the adf files to the disk instead of running it from the harddisk.
But the thing is that I have to select the adf file from the A: drive every time I've swapped the disks. Could there be a way so that I could tell WinUAE to look for the file needed, always searching the A: drive, like when playing on a real amiga so I could just switch disk when it asks for the other disk?

It would be so neat if anyone could help me, and other people having the similar wish, out here! :help

Welcome to EAB :)

Sorry I can't help with the question, but if you crave the 'real' experience why not buy an old A500/A600, quite often you'll en up with a box of games as well to play with and theres many ways of tranferring ADFs to the real Amiga and then back to disk.

Edit:

Just a thought, if you were to setup a workbench enviroment in Winuae and use a program like ADF Blitzer (available from Aminet) maybe you could write ADFs back to floppy in this way, I've never tried it though and don't have a FDD in my PC to test the theory for you!

Steve.

Er... okay... quite strange way to do it :)
You could try to name every ADF 'disk.adf' or something like that and see if that works. Better solution : Get a real Amiga ;)

Hey, great way to do it - with renaming every file the same name. But then I would still have to tell UAE to always read 'A:\disk.adf'
But I'll check it out to see if I can progress with that solution.

Buying an amiga for the real experience is not an option, I simply lack the space and I have a PC set up as a retrogaming unit with amiga, C64, VIC-20, NES, SNES, N64, PSX, DOS games and so on on it with all the original gamepads to USB. So it would be neat to just have this floppy drive as the entire "amiga hardware" ;)

fitzsteve, I dunno if I got your suggested solution correct but do you mean to transfer an adf file to a real amiga and copy it to a PC floppy disk with some kind of software to play it on a PC or...?

Thanks for your replies anyways!

Now that doesn't make any sense at all :) (means : no) Putting ADFs on PC formatted disks is already... well.. 'interesting', but each to their own ;)

Shame you don't have space for a real Miggy...

I'm not even sure if my idea would work and dont have the tools to try but what I am suggesting is setup Workbench installed to a HDF within WinUAE.

Now load WinUAE and boot into your installed workbench *and this is where I am not sure* but I was thinking if you used a tool like ADFBlitzer you could write the ADF file to a FDD as you would do in a real Amiga but all in the emulated enviroment.

You would have to set your A: drive as DF0 and I'm not sure how to do that or even if it is possible.

Just an idea really but it would the closest thing to playing games from actual FDD's

Steve.

In all honesty, that would be a really complicated way to do something very easy :) (and I don't think that'll work at all). You can't 'mount' your floppy as DF0, that much is for sure.

Yeah I realise that :D

Good, that's quite a relief :D ;)

Maybe I should check out some WinUAE forum, as I guess this is more a question related to the UAE software.. I guess you are more of the real thing in here, aren't ya? :D

No, we're pretty much both and since Toni Wilen posts about WinUAE here, you've come to the right place. It's just that your request is rather odd ;) Have you seen that you can emulate the drive sounds in WinUAE? Wouldn't that actually be a better solution?

Btw : Move time http://eab.abime.net/forumdisplay.php?f=5 ;)

Oh, sorry for posting in the wrong sub-forum! Didn't realize that there was a whole UAE section in here.

I already have the drive sound emulation on and I love it - I just want both the sound and the feeling and look of a nice floppy disk. Just the sound of the disk entering the drive.. schra-chank! It's almost a semi-erotic scenario :D

But yeah, maybe my request IS a little bit odd. But I don't think it's that complicated. I like playing amiga games on UAE, I just want to execute the adf's from my usb-floppy drive instead of running the files from HDD.
And so I don't find it completely pointless to buy a shitload of floppy disks taking up all my desktop space and swapping them around, I want to look for a solution for WinUAE to run the files automatically from the A: drive without me having to select the .adf file from the floppy. ;)

Well, we had people asking to play WHDLoad from floppies in the past, so I guess it's not that odd... ;) Anyway, maybe Toni can tell you if there is a way to do it that way.

:D

^^

Oh, I guess a whole bunch of floppies AND an Amiga is a bit more spacious isn't it? ;)

Okay, I hope Tony'll look into this then..
I don't know if I have to tell UAE what filename to look for. Or if it can detect it on its own. Hm...
I think it'll be something like TheCyberDruid's suggestion, with naming all disk files the same name and always have UAE to look after that filename. Like some sort of autorun...

I was only messing :)

I do think you're insane though! ;)

Hmm, I think KG has a point here ;)

Well actually I am but that's not the topic concerning anyways :crazy


:laughing

I just made a (to my mind) great discovery!
It is possible, as far as I was just told, to format amiga floppy disks on a PC to use as a regular PC floppy disk.
I was just browsing ebay for a lot of original games which I intend to format and put adf files on so as to play on UAE.
It may seem almost blasphemious to many in here, I guess but I am amazed of this discovery so I can get as close as possible to setup a authentic amiga gaming system with just a single USB floppy drive and UAE :D

nothing wrong with been insane or even slightly mad hehehehe

just you request is the funniest I`ve heard of for a long while

I for see a lot of problems and anguish with your request also you do`nt seem to have the backgroung knowlege (never hence the post)
amiga will only read 720k pc fromated disks

you putting 1 adf file on one 1.44Mb disk while posable seems a big chore to me, but hey
each to there own....
wonder what toni will say heheheh