Amiga on a usb drive

[Imperitus]

With usb flash drives so cheap, I was wondering, would it be possible to set up an amiga emulator on a thumb drive? Something like the U3 system but with an amiga flavor.

Plug in the drive, and an amiga window pops up, with network capability and all. That way I can carry an amiga style enviorment around with me without doing configuration specific to whatever machine I'm on.

I'm looking at winUAE, but it seems that maybe AROS might be a better option... And I'd love os4, but from what I've read thus far that seems liek it will never be possible.

Anyone have an amiga envorment running smooth off a usb drive?  What did you use and how does it run?

-Drew

[swift240]

I have got Amikit on my Athlon, using a second HD in 4 seperate partitions.
Well one day I had to reformat my main HD and all though Amikit was unafected by this, I clicked on it and I got error messages from it.
So I knew by that, that Windows had some files inside itself.
So in other words I expect you can use Amikit on a USB pen (yes I know you didnt mention Amikit)
But I am saying is  that if you do put it on a USB pen then you will still need that PC that you originaly used to put Amikit onto the USB pen as it seem's to need some certain files to get it running, at least that seem's the way it works.

I have no idea as to the other that you want to use. that may work it may not, but you get the idea of what I am saying here.

I dont know if that helps you or not.

Mike.

[Imperitus]

My Hope would be to have the entire thing installed on the usb drive so it would be completly portable.

-Drew

[swift240]

Well I dont know about the other systems, but Amikit not a chance.

Mike.

[cecilia]

if i had a thumb drive i would copy my WinUAE files just as they are on my HD right onto the flash drive. naturally, I'd have to change the pc drives listed in my config file, but that's easily done.

AROS, i'm not sure about, but maybe that's something to investigate.

[Imperitus]

This does seem possible with UAE, but I can't seem to figure out if UAE will use my pc's internet connection.

Has anyone gotten UAE to do that? Use the pc's internet?

[Wraith2021]

Mine does, but not installed on a usb drive.

Also its an install from Amiga Forever 2005.

[Imperitus]

Hum... I shall look into amiga forever. Thanks.

[irishmike]

My thought would be to get you a 1 GB thumb drive and install a small Linux on it.  You could run Linux UAE or Amiga Forever from inside that small Linux installation.  Though I am not sure how I would make the thing bootup upon insertion off the top of my head.  But theorhetically speaking, it should more than possible to do this since I know of Linux guys carrying around their entire OS on these drives.

[InTheSand]

You should be able to do this - most Linuxes can boot from a USB drive - but it does depend on the PC and its BIOS, as not all can boot directly off a USB device...

 - Ali

[AmigaHeretic]

I have a WinUAE on my thumb drive (it has U3 btw, but has no relevance for this)

I have a folder on my thumb drive called "Amiga" wich has WinUAE in it and two folders for dh0 and dh1. (Workbench and Programs respectivly)

As for the config of WinUAE all the paths are usually something like  "C:\Program Files\WinUAE\Roms\"  so instead I just put "\Amiga\Roms\"  this way when I run WinUAE off the thumb drive on a new computer I don't have to worry about what the drive letter of the thumb drive is.  It's really great.  Just plug in the thumb drive, run WinUAE, and double click on my default configuration and bam! there's Amiga OS 3.9.  You can set you config for Full Screen or Windowed mode of course.  It's pretty simple.

AmigaHeretic

[Disparil]

I've been using UAE from my USB-stick during some too boring school lessons I've been just using .adfs though, but it has worked fine.

[Tahoe]

Sounds like two different approaches being talked about here.

One is having an Emulator, complete and all, installed on a USB stick. This will work, on pretty much any PC.

Having a PC boot from your USB stick, and boot straight into AmigaOS is a different matter. First of all you will need a PC with Boot from USB capability (most modern ones do). Second you need a largish (think >1GB) USB stick and some form of OS.
I am thinking of doing something like this on a cut down version of Windows 98SE. Linux could also do.
But keep in mind a couple of things, this OS is installed with a basic set of drivers, which means it might not work on every machine. Specially networkcard drivers...

Consider that most, of not all USB sticks are marked as "mega floppy drive's", which means an OS will treat it as a removable device, not a fixed disk. To correct this you will need to modify sector 0, try a google search on how to exactly do this.

A simpler option, at least in compatiblity terms would be a bootable CD, much like AROS already is. Works on waaaay more machines. Only drawback would be that your OS is read only....

[_ThEcRoW]

@Swift240
Amikit works without getting windows system files in it, so you can use it on another pc, only, as Cecilia pointed out, you will have to set the drives in the form of the new pc has.

As for Aros on a stick it will be possible when fat32 filesystem were ported. At the moment is impossible, note that a pc, either in linux or windows isn't capable of boot off a ffs partition.

[eightbit]

I know my amiga forever 6 edition has Kxlight on it, which is a stripped down bootable knoppix(linux) knockoff.  I think this is more what your looking for. It boots directly into a 3.x (3.1 plus enhancements) environment off the cd bypassing windows .  I'd love to be able to install it to a hard drive though,  and also change it to a 1.3 environment.  I'm sure there are ways to do that.  Because of KXlight being linux based ,  I'd imagine you could contact amigaforever.com and get download the source since it should be gpl'd.