Amiga 1200 Virtual Floppy Drives ?

[douglasamcintos]

Hello Everyone,

New to the Amiga scene (never had one when I was younger) but thought I would try one out. Got an Amiga 1200 off eBay and put in a RAM expansion board. WHDLoad games works when I set the RAM to 4meg but fail with a memory error when I set it to 8meg for some reason.

This is not the problem though as all the games I want to play work fine at the 4meg setting

I was wondering if it is possible to set up a virtual floppy drive on the 1200 (am using kick rom 3.0, with WB 3.0). I have seen mention of a fmsdisk.device, but have no idea how to use it or set it up. I would need a fairly simple guide.

Or am I just best getting a stack of blank floppies and using something like adf2disk ?

Wonderful forum here.

Thanks for any help.

Douglas

[Graham Humphrey]

Not sure about the virtual floppy drive thing, but when you say you change the setting of the RAM board to 8MB, do you actually have an 8MB SIMM or only a 4MB one? Maybe it doesn't like being set to 8MB when you've got a 4MB SIMM in your expansion?

Good to see someone getting into the Amiga for the first time, enjoy it

[Charlie]

Hi,
Games: Off the top of my head you can set up a 'virtual' floppy drive for adf's - if that's the way you want to go - you'll need a 2.5" HDD ( or IDE-> compact flash adapter )
As you've got the ram & found WHDLoad & it looks like you've got/need a HDD anyway I'd suggest HD-installing the games you want & giving up on floppy's completely.

Ram: Possibilities:-
It's got 8meg of ram? ( sorry to ask )
Your ram may not be wholly compatible with your expansion board.
Your ram board may not be 'PCMCIA friendly' - have you got anything in the PCMCIA slot that is conflicting with your ram board?
You seem sure about the jumper settings - are you?

What expansion board ( other add-ons ) have you got? Also do you know what revision your mobo is? - The details may help further answers.

Finally: An A1200 + ram is about twice as fast as a stock 1200. With that & the ram WHDLoad is useful but speed+ EC'020 CPU may cause some problems. If you're going to use an A1200 as a games machine an '030 accelerator would be a good investment. An '040 or '060 would be overkill unless you are thinking of 'more seroius' applications.

Regards

*Edit*
Hi G.H. - beaten me to it
You need fast fingers to be a mod!

[douglasamcintos]

The 8meg registers on the top line of Workbench.

[Charlie]

Originally Posted by douglasamcintos

The 8meg registers on the top line of Workbench.

Fair point but may be misleading...
I recently got an A1200 with 8mb board jumpered to 2mb. 'Hmmm.' I thought, 'wrong jumper settings?'
Changed the settings to 8mb - Workbench reported 8mb, but if I loaded more than 2mb: Memory error.
Ah! WB thinks there's 8mb because the board tells it so but there isn't 8mb available.

I dug out an 8mb simm that fortunately turned out to work & now WB can believe what the board claims!

[douglasamcintos]

Device is here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/douglas...7601901162282/

The virtual floppy is more for applications as opposed to games as I seem to be having trouble finding hard drive installs of some of them. Copying to disk with adf2disk is fine, just potentially a time consuming step I can avoid if I can emulate in software.

Thanks for all the replies.

I did not have anything in the pcmcia slot at the time of testing the memory iirc.

[Charlie]

That board is a GO DIRECT LTD A1200 SIMM RAM M1205 IssA - I think!

Really, really, really rare memory board! The empty socket is for a FPU. ( Not that you generally need one with amigas )
RAM modules look like the very old style 30-pin - if true I hope you don't have faulty ones as you're very unlikely to find replacements.
As you're having memory issues it may be worth GENTLY disassembling & cleaning. ( The FPU part -> Ram part too - I think that's a connector )

I'm not going to be much help with the virtual floppies I'm afraid - It's been too long for my memory...
Hopefully someone here has done that more recently. ( or has a better memory )

Nothing in PCMCIA slot = no conflicts so that's not it.

Best of luck.

[douglasamcintos]

I think I will leave it well alone. It works well enough for now Also I am very cack handed ! May well be a rare board as long as it give me enough memory to play games I will be quite happy.

Next project replace hard drive with CF card probably.

At least until I can afford a decent quality accelerator board

[Bloodwych]

WHDload is a virtual floppy drive emulator in a way for games with non-standard Amiga dos formats (90% of titles). If you're using that, there is no reason to have many floppies is there?

Have you seen KillerGorilla's site? It's linked in yellow in the wiki FAQ pages at the top of this forum.

http://www.guildserver.co.uk/kgwhd/whdload.php

Most of the virtual floppies I've seen are useful for Amiga DOS formatted disks only. The special formats that WHDload handles will show up on the virtual floppy drive as "NDOS" - just as they would if you put a game disk into a real Amiga drive.

You might be interested in the ClassicWB packs, which have a Virtual Floppy feature built in. It uses the "fmsdisk.device" you've mentioned:

http://classicwb.abime.net/

Again linked in the FAQ wiki page.

[douglasamcintos]

Yes, thanks Bloodwych. The games are fine. It was more finding an easy, quick way to do hard disk installs of some applications (paint, dtp, word processing, whatever else I like the look of). These seem to be harder to find in hd form. Easy to find in ADF form.

So I was just wondering about a quick easy way to use th adf files without having to turn them into actual floppy disks first.

The seller of the board (I think a forum regular) told me the memory problem was something to do with WHDload and he was going to see if he could find a patch he thought existed for it.

The problem with using the classicwb setups is getting them to the hard disk. I currently do not have the equipment to do it. Also learning to set it up for myself would probably a useful experience.

Sadly when I got the Amiga it came without any manuals and copies seem to be hard to find on the internet. Many of the links I tried are now dead

I think I do need to read about different types of formatting for amiga floppies though as I am still a little confused about the differences.

[Bloodwych]

No harm in doing it yourself. It might be useful to run the classicwb just for ideas and see what things can be done.

Anyway, you were already on the right track, if you'll excuse the pun:

http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/fmsdisk

It's as easy as dropping the fmsdisk.device into the Workbench devs folder, and adding an entry for FF0: (or whatever you want to call your virtual floppy) to the devs/mountlist using a text editor (I think that pack includes a mountlist and full instructions too).

Then, you go to shell/cli and type "mount FF0:" - you should then have a virtual floppy to write adfs too.

What you really need to do though is design your Workbench in an emulator like WinUAE first, then attach your Amiga hard drive to the PC and copy everything over. It's what most people here do when installing Workbench as it's lightening fast and you don't need any special hardware. Other methods are outlined here:

http://classicwb.abime.net/classicweb/filetransfer.htm

I've never attached an Amiga drive to a PC before, but others seem to manage easily enough. Have a search and you should find some info on what to do.

[Iznougoud]

I do seem to have a taste for vintage topics - anyway, speaking of virtual drives and such - doesn't anyone around here make extensive use of RADs? I do have 128Mb FastRAM in my A2000, but even when I had "only" 32Mb FastRAM, I rarely, if ever, found RAM to be an issue. And found 880Kb RADs to be very convenient "floppies". Just a thought..

[exoticaga]

But RAD eat memory even if you have plenty of it. It leaves lots of rad icons spoiling your desktop.

ffs ds0 or similar for virtual devices are better than rad if you use them with normal or custom adf's. But again will need a hd to store and use them from.

Hard drives on an A1200 are 3.5" (cheap) or 2.5" (more money) connected to a EIDE99 controller and software. Or maybe there are other hardware sollutions better now. I remember seeing an ide 20gb hd connected this way, don't recall what the max hd size was for EIDE. With the 3.5" hd it had the drive cable running out of the back of the 1200. Eventualy saw this system in a pc tower case, then two hd's 20gb and 40gb.

Installing your software then to the hd should be simple, as using the software own installers.

Have a look on this site not just forum for links to other sites. I'm sure you will find the original manuals in pdf or other format.

[Iznougoud]

Originally Posted by exoticaga

But RAD eat memory even if you have plenty of it. It leaves lots of rad icons spoiling your desktop.

I won't argue about what's the better solution, since it would be pointless given it's more a matter of preference than anything else. My use of RADs however, was limited to when needed - which meant that when I had no use for them, I simply didn't mount them (or dismounted them when done, for that matter). Personally, I found it much easier - and in a sense cleaner - to copy disk-images and such to RADs for further temporary use during installation or whatever.
But of course, if you don't have RAM to spare, it's obviously a different matter.

[exoticaga]

You have a point with rad uses as a quick stop gap, when needed. Even longer term if scripted it, they can be there. Full of chosen software ready, from each cold boot.

The OP has 8mb or possibly just 4mb to usable. An option would be to install a hard drive. Then use the installer on each floppy. To install to hd, no virtual floppy drives needed.

[Doc Mindie]

Douglas:

I would do a serach on www.aminet.net "virtual disk drives" I know FHM is one choice as I use that myself.... or "used" when I still had 64MB mem and an 68030 in my A1200. In the documents to FHM there's a mention of some device (I think) which can also be found on Aminet anyways, so there's no need to panic about that either

Good luck

[Iznougoud]

This is perhaps a bit off topic, but one favourite device of mine is the statram.device, which allows you to create a dynamic RAD (that acts just like the RAM-disk, with the added bonus of surviving a warm reboot). I used it all the time for downloads and such. Not usable as a virtual floppy though, if I am not mistaken, since it is - dynamic . Should be available on AmiNET if anyone's curious about it.