Minimig Questions

[Darrin]

1.  I want to be able to boot floppy ADF files from a flash card, including obscure ones not available on WHDLoad.

A:  Minimig, FPGA Arcade, Chameleon64 allow the mounting of ADF floppy images into virtual floppy drives of the SD card.

2.  I want to be able to restore my old Amiga hard disk backup from floppy ADF files, onto a bootable virtual (not real) Amiga hard disk also stored on a flash card.

A:  There shouldn't be an issue with this.  Create a blank HDF file of the required size and mount it.  Then boot with your recovery ADF image containing the hard drive backup utility (or in the case of the ARM Minimig you can boot from 1 HDF image and mount a second empty one), then do your recovery by mounting the required ADF images in the virtual floppies as requested and write the backup image to your blank HDF.  Note:  I can't guarantee this will work, but I see no reason why it shouldn't.  The correctly configured Minimigs work just like "real" classic Amigas with a hard drive installed.

3.  I'd like to connect the keyboard of a dead Amiga 500 to the device.

A:  I'm unaware of any hack to allow this on the Minimig v1.1.  The FPGA Arcade might allow it via a Keyrah as the new ones are supposed to support a USB keyboard (I've got the old prototype that takes a PS2 keyboard).  The Chameleon64 allows an A500 keyboard to be attached via the docking port.  I've never tried this as I use my Chameleon attached to a real C64C:
http://www.vesalia.de/e_chameleondock.htm

Hope this helps.

Edit:  I just read that the Chameleon docking port can be attached to a Minimig v1.1 board via a cable and used with a special core.  I don't know the details of this, but I assume that it is to allow the Minimig to use the keyboard connectors and the extra joystick ports.  Can anyone confirm this?

[Darrin]

many thanks for the detailed response. So what you seem to be saying is that there is no device that can provide all three of my wishes in one single device? Namely floppy emulation, hard disk emulation, connection of Amiga 500 keyboard.

As lumi said above, the Chameleon64 should (the docking station adds the Amiga500 keyboard connector and 4 joystick ports), and possibly the newer versions of the FPGA Arcade using a Keyrah (although I'd email MikeJ for confirmation of that first).

I have a ClassicWB HDF file based on WB3.1 that runs on all three of the machines to boot into a nice Workbench screen and run WHDload.  Other games/demos can be run from "floppies" by mounting an ADF file.