Amiga + A64 cart & 1581?
 

I've pulled a few odds & ends out of the basement.



I have an A64 cartridge that plugs into an Amiga parallel port, allowing the attachment of C64 drives.


I have a 1581 drive that looks clean inside & out. Powers on. Just put a JiffyDOS ROM in it. But otherwise haven't actually read or written disks.


If I attach these bits to my A4000, can I read/write 1581 disks without an emulator running?


I peaked at Frodo & Magic64 on Aminet but didn't see if they supported drives attached with the A64 cartridge. Do they?


Thanks.

I downloaded FRODO and MAGIC64 from Aminet. Magic64 just crashed when I tried it on my A4000/060. FRODO works but I don't see any drive options to use an A64 attached 1581.

You should be able to read/write 1581 disks directly on the Amiga drive.

http://aminet.net/search?query=1581

I haven't used it, but you could try disk/misc/dopus-1541.lha on Aminet.

It contains ARexx scripts for accessing a 1541 via A64 cartridge. If they don't work directly, maybe they could easily be modified for the 1581?

At least any commands that do not read the disk sector by sector will work with the '81, so directory listings and kernal loading individual files.

I downloaded some 1581 utilities but they only work with the Amiga's floppy drive. This could be useful for some things, but they won't access the real 1581 via A64.

Running A64 just crashed, like Magic64 did. A64 has a tools program that looks like it might copy to/from a C64 attached drive, but it only crashes for me.

Since not that many have real 1581 drives, it seems more usable to just use the Amiga's own floppy drive for 1581 disks since the 1581 drive is the same as the one found inside A500s and the format easily readable by the Amiga.

In the long run, using the Amiga drive to read/write 1581 formats is fine. I just happened to have the A64 adapter, my A4000, and the 1581 all out and in the same vicinity at the same time so I wanted to see if it could work all together.

I'm considering the Easy1541 software & cable solution. It looks like this is also compatible with FRODO, which is working on my A4000 setup.

I think Magic64 could work with some tweaked settings, but it was crashing on first attempts.

3.x versions of A64 might run on AGA systems forced into ECS modes. But I've complicated my A4000 with an 060 and RTG on top of its native AGA foundation, so getting A64 to work properly is lower on my list of options.

Did you try disk/misc/dopus-1541.lha yet?

Also, the Frodo C64 emulator can use the A64 cartridge.

I don't have dopus installed so I haven't tried that yet.


How do you get Frodo to see the drive attached with the A64? Documentation doesn't mention it.



For file access Frodo let's you select a directory for a simulated drive, point to a D64 or T64 file, or a Frodo emulated 1541 drive.



Is there something within the A64 package that mounts the drive attached via the A64 cartridge so the Amiga sees it and then Frodo can be pointed to it?

Frodo will see drives attached to the parallel port using the cable bundled with A64.

I've used an IEC handler to write floppies and files to a 1541 using the A64 cable.