getting ADF files to Amiga machine

[Honey Badger]

This is probably a dumb question, but somehow I'm not quite figuring this out ...

I have an Amiga 600 with Kickstart 2.05 & Workbench 2.1 via CF card (effectively running as if it was a hard drive). That works fine and dandy. I have have some old 3.5" Amiga disks that almost miraculously still work.

I also run WinUAE on an old Windows 7 machine - using programs I scooped up online (ADF files ... diskette image files). That works fine and dandy as well.

My question is .... how, EXACTLY, do I migrate Amiga programs (as contained in ADF files) over to my Amiga 600? More specifically .... do you just copy ADF files to CF drive and run them on the Amiga? Or is there some conversion process I'm missing?

[Psiq]

I think to use the ADF file on your A600 you would need a Gotek drive connected.

[ajk]

The .adf files are akin to .iso files on the PC, so you don't just run them. You can mount them virtually on the Amiga using http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/ImageMount or something similar. However, it depends on the program in question whether this is useful. For system legal stuff it's fine, you can just copy the programs (or whatever is contained on the image) to your hard disk. But games are almost always designed to be booted directly from the floppy, so you'd need to write those to actual floppies (http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/adf2disk11 or other utility).

[Honey Badger]

thanks! that fills the gap ... seemed it wouldn't be possible to just launch an ADF file via Workbench ... a Gotek floppy drive simulator (with ADF files on a thumb drive) would be the way to go

was my hunch, but yeah, makes sense now (and that comparison to ISO files clarifies it)

[Honey Badger]

related "dumb questions" ... let's say I transfer ADFs to my Amiga via null modem cable onto the larger partition on the CF card(effectively simulating a hard drive with a small boot partition for workbench) ... is there a way to write those disk images onto actual diskettes? Does Workbench 2.1 have such capability built-in? Would I need to install a separate utility application & if so, how exactly, seems a catch-22 if that would be the case.

And for that matter, is there a terminal application or something within Workbench (as run on the Amiga itself)? That also seems a catch-22.

I've read through various pages describing migrating programs from a virtual machine to physical Amiga & looks like they assume utilities and so on are already on the Amiga ... and I'm wondering, "yeah ok, but how the heck do you get it setup in the first place?"

[Honey Badger]

Amiga Explorer perhaps? saw mention of how it can self-install utility on the physical Amiga ... not sure how that works exactly, but if so .. would be cool

[ajk]

You can get a rudimentary serial transfer done with just the shell, by directing the data coming in from the serial port to a file. I believe this is how Amiga Explorer gets itself started although I haven't really used it myself. And yes, you would need a utility such as adf2disk to then write the .adf files to physical media.

But as you have a CF card, you could just use an emulator (e.g. WinUAE) to install everything you want directly onto it, so you won't need to use slow and tedious transfer methods. This requires nothing from the Amiga. There are plenty of tutorials regarding UAE on the web, but of course feel free to ask if you get stuck.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

In the meantime, it can simplify everything by connecting the CF to WinUAE and copying thousands of ADFs in a few minutes.

To write ADF images on real floppies, there are more tools, you can use "TSGui", "ADFer" o "ADFBlitzer", i enclose some of my old exhaustive videos:

TSGui Writes ADF
[ Show youtube player ]

WinUAE: Mount / Dismount Two SD/CF (FAT32)
[ Show youtube player ]

[Wiking67]

Arduino adfreaderwriter on pc

[Honey Badger]

awesome ... thanks all!

this stuff is starting to make sense -- have successfully generated a virtual machine using hard disk file images - even got serial port communication going between the Amiga 600 & virtual machine via null modem cable

essentially, I was over-thinking it

I have experience with terminal programs & uploading/downloading app & updates on stuff like Palm & Newton PDAs; also with running virtual machines & emulators in general - understand the basic technical concepts, but for some reason, it didn't quite "click" at first with this Amiga stuff

[ajk]

Great Should be easy enough from now on.

[scuzz]

Hi

Probably going to get shot down in flames for this comment but hey.... I read so many posts about the masses of downloads people make and transferring of files and reflect that in the day I would only be able to afford a game a month or max say two. I would then spend the month or two playing Dreamweb and or Valhalla cus that's why I bought them.

Additionally I got to read the manuals and appreciate the artwork.

I have so may games for the Amiga and in truth 99% are original disks and for the most part they all work... trust me I have over 13000 disks. I obviously also have all the boxes, manuals and disks etc plus the guides. I also ADF my games where I can and keep a massive archive on the Amiga 4000.

Just that if some would just try buying a few games, not a lot, for the Amiga and running them and enjoying the world of gaming as it was meant to be. And then you can focus on differing types of game and maybe start to collect and have your own shelves of games with all the colours and manuals.

Also do as I do and restore boxes. Reassemble game packs and also copy your own disks and build contents from the outside in via the good old floppy drive.

I may be wrong but I sense there is this world out there that is just collecting masses of downloaded files for the sake of it. If you work out the time it takes to play a game there just aint enough hours in the day.

I recently rebuilt an Elvira game that took me from Zero magazine and an ST Format disk all the way through to C64 versions and then onto the Amiga. I did the same with several Amiga games. I get a sniff of a game then check all the sources, I read the magazines and scan information into the machine. I watch Ebay and then slowly slowly I piece games sets together. Its a passion and I love it.

I have one of these CF cards in a 600 but never use it and never will. I bought it as an alternative to the 2.5" but in the end sourced some cheap 2.5" drives from China cus I prefer the hard disc in the machine, if only for the sound they make. I rarely use 600s instead using the 1200s which I love along with the 500. But when I play a game it will be the original disk or one I have created myself. Better is when I can install to HD and then put the disks back in the box.

Just saying that by reverse engineering what you are doing you will learn more about the structure of disks, the difference between an image and a compressed file. Learn how to copy, compress and extract files and disk images. There is so much about the Amiga that has nothing to do with the current age of emulation and download. Cus in truth Amigans were doing this a long long long time before modern copying and downloading became the norm.

One last thing and I may be wrong, but some of these games I assume are cracked games. I have no idea who the legal owner is of games but it just feels very wrong to me. I do not distribute disks myself and refuse to issue any to anyone unless they can get approval from the originating creators. I have no idea how WHLoad or what ever its called works, but I am most sceptical that many of these games weren't the product of folk like Fairlight and co cracking disks. So whether you are playing the original I don't know.

Anyway, like I say. Just my thoughts. There is another way and that involves actually shelling out cash to buy the originals. They are generally still available. Maybe a bit risky but that is often the fun of it.

Better go now before I ruffle even more feathers.

scuzz
http://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/scuzzblog.htm

Man do I hate the time out on forum posting.

[ajk]

I'm not really sure how related all of that is to this thread, the original question wasn't even about games specifically but programs in general... but in any case WHDLoad only works with original games, not cracked ones.

Also it's simply not reasonable to expect that all of the people interested in Amiga games could actually source original, boxed copies even if they wanted to. There simply aren't that many to go around.

Personally, I've got my favorite games from back in the day as physical copies, but if I want to give some new game a quick try now, my first stop definitely won't be eBay

[Honey Badger]

Hey Scuzz,

Nice little rant there

Nothing I don't already know, by the way. And much like ajk alluded to, most of my Amiga stuff has indeed been various utilities, programming/coding languages & environments (found some cool BASIC, Pascal and even C stuff), and yeah a few old-school arcade type games ... but mostly I'm interested in public domain software.

Way back in the day, I was an Apple ][ (with a ROM card plugged into a slot that could make it effectively a ][+) owner and heavily into public domain software & even wrote a bit myself. And I'm a software developer by profession now and have a good amount of hardware-side electronics expertise. I was intrigued with the Amiga back in the '80s/'90s but never got one sadly enough ... until recently.

And actually do own a few Amiga apps on diskettes (as mentioned in my original post) - would be cool to get some more perhaps. But just generally speaking ... takes up space(physical I mean), drives can be flaky & was actually kinda surprised the one on my Amiga 600 still works as well as it does ... getting a Gotech or some such floppy emulator seems vastly more practical these days.

But, as with so much in life just generally speaking ... hey, whatever floats your boat ... to each their own.

[Honey Badger]

And speaking of CF cards for the Amiga 600 ... been having a heck of a time with the PCMCIA interface. I've read through multiple how-tos & installed all kinds of utilities like FAT95, CFD & related fixes. And have two brands including one that's supposedly the most compatible (Sandisk Ultra), 4 GB.

The Amiga detects the existence of the card (using a PCMCIA adapter) - CF0 is mounted - but shows 0K capacity & any attempt to format it errors out as does Prep Card either as Disk or System RAM.

I'm wondering if maybe being revision 37.300 of kickstart 2.05 has something to do with it (that 37.500 could be better) ... maybe ... but then again, I'm probably missing some damn little tiny piece of the puzzle.

With Amiga Explorer & null modem connection that works fine and dandy, don't exactly 'need' the PCMCIA interface, but would be nice if it works

[Arnie]

You cant format the card for system ram.
You need a PCMCIA SDram card for that.

Is the card fat32 formatted?

[Honey Badger]

Originally Posted by Arnie

You cant format the card for system ram.
You need a PCMCIA SDram card for that.

Is the card fat32 formatted?

I'm attempting to setup a Compact Flash card for use on my Amiga 600 via a PCMCIA adapter. The adapter is fine as are the CF cards (have two I've attempted to use for this purpose... one's a Verbatim and the other a Sandisk Ultra, both 4 GB) - and just to mention, have used them on other computers(Windows laptop & PC and a Mac) just fine and dandy.

And yup, have formatted the CF cards with either FAT or FAT32 ... and neither would work on the Amiga. PrepCard tool does indeed recognize the card when inserted - and that no card inserted when not. But, attempting to 'Prepare as DISK' or 'Prepare as System RAM' doesn't work - "Unable to prepare card: Error while writing changes" appears rather quickly (and appears that no writing was actually performed at all). And Format under System sees the existence of a device attached to CF0 - but says 0K capacity and attempting to format doesn't accomplish anything.

I've also attempted the route of entirely wiping out the CF card (via diskpart in a command line(run as Administrator) on a Windows machine and 'clean' ... and then formatting it on a virtual machine Amiga in WinUAE. And it still won't be usable on my physical Amiga 600.

Assuming there's not something wrong in my Amiga 600's hardware, I'm missing a step in the setup I suppose. I've made several attempts from various angles and haven't quite gotten it yet.

However, while writing this message, I ran across yet another tutorial page describing how someone got this done using 'PFS3' and WinUAE -- seems promising ... will see.

[ajk]

It's been a while since I've set up a CF card for PCMCIA use, but there are a few key things to take into account.

Firstly - as already mentioned - the PrepCard stuff is meant for cards that present themselves directly as RAM, so not applicable here.

Secondly, you generally don't format the CF card on the Amiga side at all, but on the PC. The reason for installing FAT95 is to make the Amiga understand FAT32 in order to facilitate file transfers from the PC without using WinUAE. Also when formatting on the PC, make sure it's FAT32 and not NTFS or something else.

You can of course also format the card with an Amiga file system, but Windows won't understand that so it will then be for use with WinUAE only. In fact, Windows quite often helpfully offers to format disks that have Amiga file systems on them, so be careful

Thirdly, when transferring files it's best to keep them as archives or image files (.lha, .adf etc.) and unpack on the Amiga. This is because the Amiga file system has certain file attributes which don't translate properly to FAT32 and will be lost.

[Honey Badger]

Something I've wondered ... way back in the early 1990s when the Amiga 600 & 1200 new, it must have been possible to format a PCMCIA card directly w/o jumping through such hoops.

And looks like part of the processing mentioned via the WinUAE route is to customize some of the setting specifically to make the card usable on an actual physical Amiga --- indeed, that's the very purpose of the tutorial ... to partition/prepare a Compact Flash card to ultimately be usable on a real Amiga.

Have gotten lha & adf2disk etc working on the hardware

Just would be nice to have a CF drive working via the PCMCIA slot - not vital of course, but would be cool.

A different matter, but do have an old PCMCIA ethernet card - would be fun to see if I could get that going on the Amiga for having it online! There must be TCP/IP stacks and what not to make that possible

[ajk]

OK, there are two, if not three things here now which are all different...

1) Actual PCMCIA RAM or Flash cards. These were expansions mainly for laptops in the 90s , with a size in the order of a couple of megabytes. These are what PrepCard deals with.

2) CompactFlash card connected to the Amiga's IDE connector, inside the machine. CompactFlash was designed to be pin compatible with PATA hard drives*, so (using a simple adapter) one can be used to replace what would otherwise be a 2.5" hard disk. You can set one up using just the Amiga itself exactly as you would a hard drive (a full Workbench installation comes with the utilities for this). Setting one up in WinUAE is just convenient these days but not by any means a must.

* however, as the world is not perfect, some are not entirely compatible

3) CompactFlash card used in a PCMCIA adapter. This is not used to replace a hard drive, or to boot from, only to transfer files to and from the Amiga without having to open up the case. Generally you'd want this to be in the FAT format for ease of use with Windows. WinUAE is not needed here.

Could you perhaps be mixing instructions from different guides?

You can use a PCMCIA ethernet card assuming there are drivers for it; check for compatibility in http://aminet.net/package/driver/net/prism2v2