This is half an hardware issue and half a software question.
Here it is:
Let's say I've got a bare, unexpanded A500.
I want to run a demo (or whatever) on it, which is freely available for downloading, in the usual .mdf or .lha form.
So, I can download it on my pc hard drive, and...?
How can I create a floppy, possibly bootable, to feed to the Amiga 500?
Is WinUAE of any help?
thanks in advance
Your amiga can read a MSDOS formatted 3.5 (720) with crossdoss however it can't boot it.
You can transfer files over to the amiga's RAM disk via serial connection and write them to an amiga 880K disk. Obviously that is very tedious. if you truly have an unexpanded A500 with 512K, You'll at least want an external floppy to download to as intermediary storage because ram will fill up quickly.
Some versions of Amiga Forever come with Amiga explorer, which probably will do what you want. I have never used it, but I know it works over serial connection.
The only way that I know to truly create a (Amiga formatted) floppy on the PC is to get a Catweasel controller. WinUAE can be used with the Catweasel. I don't know how available that controller is anymore and if it is even supported under Windows7. I would make sure to do my homework on that before I would buy it.
You could look into getting a floppy drive emulator for the Amiga and forget about floppies.
Its getting harder and harder to find good quality media.
You could also look into sourcing an AD-IDE HD controller and a compact flash to IDE converter. You could use UAE to write to the CF. That is the solution I would probably look into.
I am far too impatient to mess around with serial port connections or floppy disks...
good luck, hope that gives you some options.
_nate
