Gettng Amiga floppies to Macs

[danamania]

After nearly 7 years with barely any access to an Amiga, I picked up an A2000HD with scsi card and 2.0 ROMs today for $10AUS. This means some of the pics and files I'd not been able to get to for years are now accessible. woohoo!

Now - with my Amiga knowhow faded down to somewhere near nil, I need a little help on the best way to move the files from Amiga->Macs. I have a good range of Macs from the 1980s to today (about 70 of them), and figure the two easiest options are...

1. Connect the Amiga to a Mac with a serial cable, and xmodem/zmodem/etc them across. This depends on me finding a terminal app on one of the floppies I have that still works. I'm pretty sure there's one there, but I'll have to run through about 200 disks to make sure.

2. Format a spare scsi HD as DOS, mount it on the Amiga, dump my files across to it, then connect the HD to a mac and copy them off. I'm OK with the Mac side of things, but about all I can remember on the Amiga side is the term Crossdos and something to do with mountlists - it all fades so very quickly .

Any pointers for #2? What DOS format do HDs need to be for the Amiga to readily read them, and what's the best online reference for getting the Amiga to read/write to the HD well?

I have Wb2 and 3.something here to use, if I need.

Dana

[amiga_3k]

Dana:

May I suggest option #3? It's the one I'm using.

I've got an Apple 9600/300 with the standard internal ZIP drive. A few months ago I got me an A2000 again (after years of absence) and shoe-horned a few bits and pieces from a retired Apple 8600/250. Initially I wanted to take the internal SCSI ZIP of that unit and fit it into the Amiga but decided to opt for an second hand external ZIP SCSI drive, which came with media :-). Using CrossMAC on the Amiga-end I can read and write Mac formatted ZIP disks making the transfer of files rather straightforward and quick. Disadvantages? Yes. Which? Longfilenames. But that can be worked-around by packing files into a ZIP archive, securing the longfilenames.

[skurk]

From the top of my head:

- Attach your Amiga hdd to your Mac's IDE bus.
- Start UAE, mount a local directory as dh0:
- Mount the Amiga hdd as dh1: or something
- Download whatever you want from MacOS to the local directory mounted as dh0:, then copy it to dh1: from UAE
- Reconnect the drive in your Amiga.

[Note: I've never done this myself]

[lorddef]

Well with a laplink cable or a null modem you could use pc2amiga

I think there is a filesystem somewhere on aminet (called fat95 or something?) that'll let you mount fat32 disks, also if you want to transfer the files off via floppy you could use crossdoss, you'd have to boot up into 3.0 or better though I think.

I used pc2amiga quite a bit with an old A600 back in 96/7.

[danamania]

@amiga_3k

Ahhh I'd forgotten about crossmac!. I think that'd be the sane route. I have a bunch of scsi external zip drives that I can put to good use, and a zip100 is easily large enough to do all I need, and convenient enough to not need reconnecting devices all over the place

Dana

[amiga_3k]

Dana:

Just re-read your initial post: 70-ish Apples? My wife should read this :-) She thinks I'm a lunatic with an A2000, A4000T a couple (three or four) of 1st series iMacs and the Big Box 9600.

Oh, you might need to do some fine-tuning on CrossMAC. On my A2000 diskchanges of the ZIP drive are not recognized correctly, making the machine freeze-up. A quick re-boot is enough to solve it. I'm positive that a neet solution to this problem exists but as it takes only like 10 to 20 secs for the kick2.0 A2000 to fully re-boot it would probably take a lot of re-boots to justify the research time for that solution.