Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: w00p on July 13, 2003, 03:01:43 AM
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Hi everyone! I just bought an Amiga 500 off eBay and was wondering if someone could help me with the following problem.
I have some games on my PC that I want to transfer over to my Amiga. The Amiga is a A500 with no HD and only uses DD disks. The files I want to move off my PC are .ADF format, but I am not sure what I can do to move them. I am able to format the floppy disks I just bought to 720kb, but the size of these .ADF files are 900k (or close to it) and they won't transfer over. I am at a loss as to what I can do.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
w00p
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Hmm, you're a bit stuck, I'm afraid. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there are just a few ways for you to get the adfs written to disk, and none of them are very easy and some are downright expensive.
1) A Catweasel PCI card for your PC would allow you to write the adfs direct to disk using your PC's floppy drive. However these are not cheap, at about 80 euros. It's the most powerful solution though.
2) Assuming your A500 has enough RAM (which is unlikely) you could set up a serial network on one Amiga boot disk, use this transfer the adf to the A500's ramdisk, and write it to floppy from there. A finicky option with loads of potential trouble and unlikely to work with less than 2MB of RAM - which, as far as I remember, stock A500s weren't supplied with.
3) Get a hard drive for you A500 and set up a serial network from that. Easier than the RAM option, but it's virtually impossible to add a hard drive to an A500 these days. I have no idea how to go about it - the A500 was before my time.
4) Much as I hate to say it...you could just forget about the A500 and use UAE. It's about 99.9% compatible and has no loading speed issues like floppy disk, and it uses the adfs directly from the PC's hard drive. It renders your A500 redundant and makes the point of buying one in the first place moot, so I guess this is not what you want.
5) Send or give the adfs to a friend with a modern Amiga with HD and internet access or a CDROM and let him/her to the work of writing the games to floppy.
6) Split the adfs on your PC using a tool such as sploiner (on Aminet) that has splitter and joiner executables for both MS-DOS and Amiga. Then put the halfs on seperate disks and join them on the A500. Still needs an HD or a decent amount of RAM, though; although you *just might* get away with 1MB.
That's all my suggestions. None are particularly good, but it's the best I can do. Good luck.
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Thats a hard one. I have never used a "amy" without a hard drive. but u need a serial or parallel transfer programme of some kind. And a cabel (serial nullmodem or parallel) to go with it. And of course u will need at least 1 mb of memory with that kind of setup (for a 900k filetransfer thats propably not enough, depending on how u do it).
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here is a good link for more info:
http://cloanto.com/kb/3-118.html
well, I don't know how to make that link clickable....
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KennyR wrote:
2) Assuming your A500 has enough RAM (which is unlikely) you could set up a serial network on one Amiga boot disk, use this transfer the adf to the A500's ramdisk, and write it to floppy from there. A finicky option with loads of potential trouble and unlikely to work with less than 2MB of RAM - which, as far as I remember, stock A500s weren't supplied with.
It is possible to write the data directly from serial line to disk and this works even on stock A500. Get ADF sender terminal (http://homepage.uibk.ac.at/homepage/c725/c72578/amiga/) and transdisk (from the same page) and read the FAQs and docs carefully. All you need is WorkBench 1.3 disks.
Yes, I know transferring a disk image thru serial is damn slow but propably the cheapest option. And if you use 8 minutes to transfer the disk, you propably play it for hours :-D
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a small hint , there is a couple of a500 hd's on aminet atm , i would go for one of em if i was you..
or just get a catweasel...for your pc..
kennyr:ermm what are you saying..., ok so you think that uae is 99.9% done and emulate all perfectly?? , i want you to prove that, sure i know its better than ever but still you need like 787078969 cfg files , back and forth just to get 1 game running, the game will most likely crash somewhere in there etc...
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i said AMINET ...i meant to say EBAY!!
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kennyr:ermm what are you saying..., ok so you think that uae is 99.9% done and emulate all perfectly?? , i want you to prove that, sure i know its better than ever but still you need like 787078969 cfg files , back and forth just to get 1 game running, the game will most likely crash somewhere in there etc...
99.9% is a guess. UAE will now load almost every adf you try. Myself when I've used it I find its compatibility to be almost perfect, although a real Amiga is much nicer to use. And if you get the adfs from Back2Roots (which anyone should), it will tell you problems UAE will have.
And why so many cfg files? Just use one - A500 setup.