Adf to real amiga disk

[alx]

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Amiga :-)

The hand is basically a prompt to get you to insert any disk.  Once a disk is inserted, it will boot off that (the Amiga can not just boot off kickstart).

The standard way to convert an ADF to a real disk is to boot the Amiga, then use a program on the ADF to write to a disk.  Unfortunately, you seem to be in a bit of a catch-22 with this!

What I'd do is find someone who lives near you and could lend you a Workbench disk.  You could then use this, and a program, to take your ADFs across.

What do you want the use the Amiga for?  WB1.2 is very old - you'll find that most (if not all) modern software will run on it.  If you can get yourself a 3.1 ROM, you will notice a huge improvement.  It should be enough for "classic" games though.

[alx]

If it's just for playing old games, I wouldn't bother installing a new ROM (at least for the moment).  It's a bit of hassle (you need to take off the metal shielding) and wouldn't be needed for those games.  What I would do it:

* Get a WB disk from someone
* Get a program from Aminet, called TransADF or something
* Copy the ADF files for the games onto the Amiga.  You could put them onto a double-density IBM-formated disk, and read them with crossdos (if you have it).  Or you could use the null-modem cable.
* Using this, make "real" disks from the ADF.

Don't expect the graphics and speeds from an A500 that you could get from UAE, but that should easily cope with older games.  The only problem you might have is if the games want 1Mb of memory.

[alx]

you can copy perfect Amiga floppies on a windows machine.

Sadly not.  It's the way the Amiga floppy controller allowed far more control than the PC one.  You can now get Amiga disks to ADF using a program called Disk2FDI - you need two floppy drives, though.

[alx]

Nice deal!

What are  the disks to the right?  Even if you havn't got the actual WB disk, have you tried seeing whether any of them boot to a WB?  As long as they're not games, there's a chance they could, and then you can go from there.

[alx]

But those disks didn't contain a WB.

Did it just boot up to an application, or did the screen flash colours or something (if so, there's a h/w problem somewhere)

So i haven't got a screen for my amiga's yet

Do you have something called a modulator (I couldn't see one on the pictures).  That allows you to plug an Amiga into the back of a TV (not great display, but it should work).  Otherwise, you might need to get either:

* An old monitor that plugs straight into the back of the Amiga (new one's won't work unless they're multisync - the Amiga's display is only 15Hz)

* An adapter that plugs into the output and gives you SCART

* A modulator

* A Scandoubler (doubles the refresh rate for  newer monitors) or a Flickerfixer (means interlace screens will work well on a modern monitor).

Now i have to find out if a disk contains WB, how can i recognise a WB in a program / game?

When you put in a disk, the display will change.  Give it a while and eventually the Amiga should have booted from the disk.  If you see an Amiga-DOS screen (a big window with some text and a prompt - probably white text on blue background) then you can do some stuff from there.  If you get into a screen with icons, that's Workbench.

and an amiga EXTERNAL (parallel) floppy disk can't be connected to a PC?

Not unless you build you're own controller - there are instructions somewhere on the net for this.

[alx]

And i need WB to open a CLI?

You need a disk with the avail command on it - WB would do nicely :-)