Question from an Amiga Newbie - Zip Drives...

[amigadave]

Greetings All,

I have an A500+ with 1mb chipram that I acquired a few years back. I never really fully migrated from my C64 to the Amiga back in the late 90s and know very little about them, but I want to learn more!

I want to have a simple way of getting data (mostly games) back and forth between the Amiga and a PC or Mac. I'd like to avoid and direct connection to a PC. My question is this...

Would having a SCSI Zip 100 Drive hooked up to the Amiga, and a USB Zip 100 Drive hooked up to the PC be a viable and easy way to do this? I've read tidbits here on the forum about this, but I'm still somewhat confused. Would I need a Special driver on the Amiga to be able to read a PC formatted Zip 100 disk?

I know that some UNIX flavors recognize Amiga files systems, is OS X one of them?

Thanks a million!

I use ZIP drives and 100mb & 250mb ZIP discs to transfer files between my PC and my Amigas as well as from Amiga to Amiga.  With the small file size for most things on the Amiga, ZIP discs are a very good alternative to MSDOS formatted floppy disks and CrossDOS on the Amiga.  I have both internal and external ZIP drives, all SCSI interface for the Amigas and one ZIP 100mb USB drive and one ZIP 250mb USB/SCSI drive that I use connected to my PC when needed.  If you have a SCSI controller for your A500+, you should be able to find a SCSI ZIP drive somewhere for sale and if you can find the combination ZIP 250mb with both USB & SCSI interfaces, you could use just that one drive for both your PC and your A500+ (except you would need to shut down the Amiga before swapping the drive from the Amiga to the PC).  I can't remember where I got an example ZIP 100mb mount list to use on the Amiga, but if you need it I could post it here, or email it to you.

Since ZIP drives are considered pretty small for any PC work these days, you should be able to get a good price for a used one and 100mb to 250mb is a good size for a bunch of Amiga files.

Good luck,

[amigadave]

What about this approach?

Say I was able to get an IDE sidecar HardDrive for the 500. Shouldn't I be able to plug in one of those IDE to Flash Card adapters and use that to transfer the data back and forth? What considerations would I have to give as far as the data format of the card? Would I need, say, CrossDos on the Amiga?

Thanks again!

I answered your other thread with the exact same question (not a good idea to post the same question in multiple threads around here), but will give you a different thought here.  The advantage of having two ZIP drives, one connected to your PC and one connected to your Amiga A500+, is that would be the easiest way to transfer files without having to turn off either computer, as you just use it like a very big floppy disk drive and carry the optical ZIP discs from one drive to the other.  It is more expensive, unless you can find the used drives for very cheap (could be possible).  They do make internal IDE ZIP drives (I have one of those in an A4000 which has been put into a tower case), SCSI, Parallel and USB ZIP drives.  The Parallel drives are probably the most common and cheapest to buy and there is a way to use the Parallel model with the Amiga's different Parallel port (see Aminet for directions on how to do it).

The CF adapter to IDE controller idea will work, but the side car would need to be left open if you were going to take out the CF card and place it into your PC to transfer files and you would have to turn off the Amiga every time you removed it.