Ok ... still confused on transferring files from the PC to Amiga

[w00p]

Ok, as the title mentions, I am still kind of confused as to how this is done. I bought this Amiga 500 on eBay --> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2789658120, and as you can tell it has both a CDRom drive and a Syquest SQ-555 Ext 44MB Drive. My question is this.

I have a lot of .ADF files that I have downloaded from back2roots. I don't know if I should try to hook up the Syquest drive to my PC (running XP) and transfer them over, then connect the Syquest drive back to the Amiga 500 and write the .ADF's to 880k disks. Or, should I burn a CD with the ADF's on my PC and try to load it into the CDRom drive on the Amiga 500 and try to transfer these files over that way. The Amiga also has cross-dos, which might be another option???

What would you suggest? I am not even sure that you can take a .ADF file, for example, elite.adf and copy this over to a 880k and then it will load. Is there something else you need to do? Also, I have heard you need to burn a CD in a specific format for it to be read on an Amiga 500.

I'm sitting here scratching my head as to what is the best way to do this. If you can take the time to let me know, AND explain it to me, like I am a 3yr old, I would greatly appreciate it.

Much thanks in advance!

[Noster]

Hi,

first you should go to the Aminet and get a tool for writing the .ADF's to floppy:

http://ftp.uni-paderborn.de/aminet/aminet/disk/misc/Image2Disk.lha

Then I would burn a CD-Rom on your PC containing the ADF's (I think no special format is required, I've read and made a backup of a Windoof 98 installation CD using my Amiga ;-), there was no problem in reading it).
The only problem may be the age of your system, maybe your CD-Rom filesystem at your Amiga is to old and fails to read such an CD or your Amiga CD-Rom may fail to read CDR's. My old TEAC have had problems with CDR's with a silver or gold surface, the blue ones worked well, just try another type of CDR if you have I/O errors while reading them...

Noster

[Ilwrath]

I agree with Noster, totally.  

an .ADF is a disk image.  In modern terms, think of it as a floppy disk version of an ISO file.  You can't just write that to a CD and expect it to work.  (You'll end up with a CD with a .iso file on it.  useless)  You need to use a program that can read the .ISO and write a real CD back out of it.  

Same thing with .ADF.  The image2disk program reads the .ADF and can write a real disk back out of it.  (Just copying the .ADF to a disk will only give you a disk with an ADF on it.  useless)

CD Rom is probably the easiest way to transfer the files, if you can burn it from your PC.  To cut down on confusion, personally, I'd just use only standard ISO 8.3 filenames on the CD, and then burn the CD with no extensions (no Joliet extended filenames, etc) at all.  

[w00p]

I burnt a CD with a lot of .ADF files, along with the image2disk (un-compressed). Is there a specific format / execution method for running this program?? What file do I run to use it? I wanted tp convert bubble_1.adf to play. I have all my files on a hard drive that I am reading on the Amiga 500 ... I couldn't find a readme to tell me how to do it, please help!!!

[Castellen]

Obviously you'll need to decompress the image to disk program to make it run on the A500.

It's probably compressed with LHA, so you'll need LHA to extract it.
If you need the LHA executable, grab it from:
http://amiga.serveftp.net/downloads.html

Download from the link at the top of the page.

Move LHA to the A500, put it into SYS:C/LHA
Open a CLI (shell) window on the A500 and use it like this:

lha x DH0:ExampleName.lha

and the files will be extracted right then and there.


Personally I'd suggest TransADF from Aminet to write your ADF images.

Use it like this:

TransADF DRIVE DF0: FILE ExampleName.ADF WRITE


Easy as that!

[Castellen]

Oops, didn't read your post properly! :-)
I'm bad for that.

But you get the idea.  You can write ADF images direct from CD to disk.

TransADF DRIVE DF0: FILE CD0:ExampleName.ADF WRITE


That's assuming your A500's drive is mounted as CD0:

[jjans]

I have simular systems as yours with a Windoze XP machine and an A500. I have used 880K floppies to transfer files via CROSSDOS with ease. I had to format 880K disks to MSDOS with CROSSDOS on the Amiga first, as XP will not format any floppies other than 1.44MB.

I quickly became impatient with this process, and so set up a connection between com1 on the PC, to the serial port on the A500 via a serial cable and NULL Modem Box. Using Hyperterm on the PC and Terminus on the amiga I was able to transfer files at speed of only 56K due to limitations of the Amiga's serial.device. Kind of slow, and terminus can be a pain to set up... but it was fun getting it to actually work.

I then bought an online copy of Amiga forever at:cloanto which includes Amiga Explorer that offers networking between the PC and Amiga. This I found easy to set up following the included documentation. The interesting thing with Amiga Explorer is the capabilty to write ADF images directly to the Amiga's disk drive, controlled from the PC without the need to enter transdisk commands from the Amiga. Again this was a limited speed solution due to the max transfer of 56 K of the serial.device on the Amiga.

Adding a CDROM to my A500 changed everything. I burned ADF's (or software from AMINET), to CD on the PC, then simply made floppies from the Amiga with the excellent Image2Disk. It has an easy to use GUI that is better than transdisk. You can even write adf images directly to your hard disk using: HFMounter, and fms.device. The advantage of this is speed, in comparison to writing ADF images to a real floppy. This does not work for most NONDOS disks, but can really speed up hard disk installation for lots of other images. You should have no problems reading the CD's burned on XP, as they both support the Rockridge standard.