FS-UAE for MacBookPro

[alphagemini]

I am using a MacBook Pro to run FS-UAE. I want to run my own software originally written using HiSoft basic on an Amiga 4000/040 with a math coprocessor. I have an external floppy drive connected to my Macbook.

I have downloaded FS-UAE launcher app and want to use the default ROM.

What do I do now? Simple words please for a bear of small brain!

regards and thanks to anyone who can help

[alphagemini]

for ROM please read 'Kickstart"

[ajk]

Not sure if you already read my reply in the other thread, but you can't read Amiga floppies using an ordinary (USB?) floppy drive on a modern system. If you don't want to invest in specialist hardware yourself, the easiest option would be to have someone image the floppies for you.

[alphagemini]

Thanks for your reply. I might need to make images in the future, so I would like to know what hardware I need. I have the 4000/040 hard drives off the failed Amiga

[ajk]

Hard drives - assuming they are reasonably modern and not very early 20MB drives or such - you should be able to read with almost any IDE to USB adapter. Just be careful that you don't format the drives, as obviously OSX or Windows won't understand the drives' content and might offer to format them instead. The AmigaForever website has some instructions for Windows, on a Mac you'll need to do further research on what tools are available. Probably at least Unix based tools like dd could be used.

For floppies you can use an otherwise ordinary floppy drive but you need a specialist controller such as the Kryoflux. A USB floppy drive won't work. Kryoflux comes with its own software to create the disk images.

[modrobert]

You can use 'dd' in a terminal/shell on the mac to make an image of the hard drive with an IDE to USB adapter as mentioned, but can FS-UAE access raw hard drive images as files? If so, what Amiga file systems are supported (FFS,PFS3,..)?

On a Linux system you can mount the hard drive if it uses FFS and access the files directly.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by modrobert

You can use 'dd' in a terminal/shell on the mac to make an image of the hard drive with an IDE to USB adapter as mentioned, but can FS-UAE access raw hard drive images as files? If so, what Amiga file systems are supported (FFS,PFS3,..)?

Yes, you can boot FS-UAE off a hard disk image like that, and it will support the filesystems existing in the kickstart used and those installed on RDB of the disk image. Just like real Amiga

[alphagemini]

thanks

[alphagemini]

I have an IDE to USB adapter which happily fits the 40 pin tape on the solid state Amiga HD. The business about dd is over my head. How do I get it and use it? Words of one syllable only please!

[Matt_H]

dd is a command-line tool, so you'll need to use OSX's Terminal program. There are two basic things you'll need to do:
1. Find out the device name of your Amiga hard drive when it is connected to your Mac via the USB adapter
2. Use dd with the aforementioned device name as the input file and a destination file name as the output file.

I don't know the exact syntax for these commands, but someone here should be able to provide it.

Be very careful with this operation as it is possible to accidentally overwrite your Amiga hard disk. If there is a write-protect switch or jumper on the drive, enable it just to be safe.

[alphagemini]

It sounds a bit risky. The solid state HD has not read/write control

[alphagemini]

How do you find out the name of a device?

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by alphagemini

How do you find out the name of a device?

First you need to become root user in the terminal, haven't tried this on Mac OSX, but looks like you type 'sudo -s' and enter your current user password. If that fails you can try 'sudo su -'. An indicator that you are "root" is the '#' prompt in the terminal.

After plugging in the USB to IDE adapter, use the 'diskutil list' command in the terminal and look for the device name of the disk connected via adapter, it will read something like /dev/xxx (where xxx is the disk device you found using previous command).

To start the copy process, as root enter this command:

dd if=/dev/xxx of=/tmp/my_amiga_hard_disk.dd

This will dump the hard drive to your temp directory with the file name 'my_amiga_hard_disk.dd'. Note that the /tmp directory will be deleted at reboot, so copy the file where you want it after the 'dd' command is finished.

[alphagemini]

Thanks, great help.