Writing Amiga Disks with a PC?

[tesla]

is it possible?

I have a floppy drive in my old homebuilt AMD. Has anyone done it?

[T_hairy_bootson]

Not without additional specific hardware.

cryoflux, catweasel etc..

Better off buying a serial or parallel port card for your homebuilt AMD and getting a null modem cable, or a SCSI card for your PC so you can use your a2000 hdd in the PC, set it up to read CD-Roms and then burn stuff you want to transfer over... or a network card for your A2k.

[tesla]

My old PC has the old-style DB serial and parallel connectors, look like I'm in luck.

Couldn't I also just burn cd's and then read them with my Amiga's cd drive?

Speaking of, is it possible to use dvd drives with an Amiga? (Yes, I know, most Amiga programs are small, compared to PC programs). If not, what about a cd burner drive? Seems that would be a great way to burn backups.

[s2325]

You can burn any CD32 or CDTV game, there wasn't any copy protection.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by tesla

is it possible?

I have a floppy drive in my old homebuilt AMD. Has anyone done it?

In theory this should be possible with some hardware interface and tricky code however AFAIK such code not exist.

But perhaps someone can write such code - interface can be simple USB to Serial adapter (FTDI 232 etc) with simple TTL logic or small uC data can be sent or read from FDD in RAW format (Serial USB IC are usually capable to provide speed around 1.5Mbps - FTDI up to 3Mbps).

[thomas]

You can connect any CD/DVD/BD+/-R/RW/RAM drive to your Amiga, given that it has an IDE or SCSI controller.

You can read CDs and DVDs in ISO9660 format. Depending on the file system which is installed on your Amiga it can read either plain ISO9660 or even Joliet extenstions.

There is no way to read UDF format currently (even if advertised).

You can write CDs for sure. I am not sure if software exists to write DVDs, but I think so.

[videofx]

I just burn CD in ISO9660 and then take it to my amiga. Just remember to leave the file in compressed format and burn to CD. If you uncompress on the PC and burn to CD all the .INFO amiga files will be burned as .INF and will not work on the Amiga.

I just got a network card for my Amiga so I can save on CD's

[tesla]

I just had a thought.
I know that the 3.1 roms in my 2000 have built-in support for scsi, because I can see my HD. But, what about 3.1 support for cd's? Has anyone burned a custom 3.1 rom with that support? Seems like that 3.1 roms could be updated in several ways to bring it into the present.

Or, to put it another way, how about a 3.2 rom?

[emufan]

you can play with Remus and RomSplit by doobrey. some adding modules from the 3.9 update into their kickstarts. not sure about your specific problem, but take a look. before burning, you can test them using winuae.
search the eab board, you find more infos about these tools here.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by tesla

I just had a thought.
I know that the 3.1 roms in my 2000 have built-in support for scsi, because I can see my HD.

I am quite sure the driver for your SCSI is not in the 3.1 ROM but in the firmware ROM of the SCSI controller. The Kickstart ROM only contains drivers for motherboard components, not for expansions. Every expansion which needs a driver at boot time has a firmware ROM with this driver.

[Jonathan Drain]

There are some cool alternatives to writing PC disks on Amiga.

There's a floppy disk drive simulator device for Amiga that reads from SD card. I forget the name of it. You can also get a very cheap PCMCIA SD card reader: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=58336

The Amiga can also read/write 720kb MS-DOS formatted floppy disks. Before I got my PCMCIA SD card reader I used to copy disk images over, half at a time.

[Cymru]

HxC Floppy Emulator sells for about £90 on eBay UK; each is hand made in Poland and fits any 34-pin FDD connector to save ADF's onto an SD card. You would use your PC to save the ADF's using a USB card reader to the SD and the HxC would "read" them as floppies from the card.

[lesta_smsc]

You are better off building a null-modem cable to connect your PC to your Amiga. There is a bunch of free software, in fact, you can also you LPT (printer/parallel port) for this purpose. I'm sure someone can send you the required software for the Amiga side (if you have no other means of writing the ADF/getting files across). Do you have workbench? If so, look into Cloanto Amiga Forever. Great piece of kit!

[Cymru]

As another solution: I have an 2500 with a GVP SCSI controller connected to a HDD, CDROM & one of Mech's SCSI card readers. The card reader can boot from a CF or SD card, make backups and read files stored on it from the PC. Your SCSI ROM may limit you to 4 GBs, but that is the size of a DVD.