Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: Can I make Amiga floppies on a Mac?  (Read 3873 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Huxley_DTopic starter

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Join Date: Sep 2008
  • Posts: 100
  • Country: us
    • Show all replies
    • Check out The Retro Roadshow, my pop-up museum of vintage technology!
Can I make Amiga floppies on a Mac?
« on: October 06, 2008, 06:35:22 PM »
Hi guys,

I recently picked up a fairly worn A500, which came with tons of game disks (upwards of 70!), but no GUI or OS disks.  Since I've got plenty of old Macs (with floppy drives) around, I'm wondering if there might be a way to take a disk image (say a Kickstart GUI disk) from the web, put it onto an older Mac, and use the Mac to make a floppy that the A500 can read?  I did something similar a while back with my Apple IIgs, so it came to mind in this case.

Any thoughts or suggestions, or should I start panhandling for an OS floppy?

Thanks,

Huxley
 

Offline Huxley_DTopic starter

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Join Date: Sep 2008
  • Posts: 100
  • Country: us
    • Show all replies
    • Check out The Retro Roadshow, my pop-up museum of vintage technology!
Re: Can I make Amiga floppies on a Mac?
« Reply #1 on: October 06, 2008, 06:58:04 PM »
Cool, that about settles it then.

So, with that being the case, can anyone share some ideas or tricks to get a Workbench disk these days?  I spent the morning on a work-related conference call, to to keep myself awake, I tore down the A500, and found several interesting things:

1:  For a machine without fans, this thing had an absolutely astonishing amount of dust and lint inside!

2:  The reason many of the included game disks weren't working seems to have been the huge lint-ball trapped inside the floppy drive, and

3:  This 500 seems to be a Rev. 5 motherboard, and looks to have a 512k RAM expansion in the underside-bay.  The module is completely sealed inside a metal cage, so I can't see the circuit board inside, but it looks an awful lot like some pics I've seen of similar RAM modules.

Thanks for the continued support of this Amiga noob!

Huxley
 

Offline Huxley_DTopic starter

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Join Date: Sep 2008
  • Posts: 100
  • Country: us
    • Show all replies
    • Check out The Retro Roadshow, my pop-up museum of vintage technology!
Re: Can I make Amiga floppies on a Mac?
« Reply #2 on: October 06, 2008, 07:37:03 PM »
Hmm, then that raises an interesting question:  A large number of the disks I got with the machine don't do anything when I insert them at bootup - the screen just keeps showing the "Insert Disk" graphic.  This doesn't happen with all disks though - maybe 50-60% though.  Does this mean that many of my disks are bad?  I guess I'd assumed that I wouldn't be able to run them without a GUI disk.

Huxley
 

Offline Huxley_DTopic starter

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Join Date: Sep 2008
  • Posts: 100
  • Country: us
    • Show all replies
    • Check out The Retro Roadshow, my pop-up museum of vintage technology!
Re: Can I make Amiga floppies on a Mac?
« Reply #3 on: October 06, 2008, 08:24:08 PM »
I'll double-check later, but I'm pretty sure the graphic says Kickstart 1.3.  Does that make a difference, and also, are there ROM updates / upgrades for these machines?

Thanks!