Putting ADF's on floppy w/out a hard drive

[amazing]

well as u readed adfblitzer wont run in kick 1.3
u need 2+ and more as 1mb ram

maybe when he uses a different proggie he can use 2drives?

[AmigaPete]

->amazing; I don't think you comprehend the problem that BGary has - he has the ADF file on a PC and needs to put it onto his Amiga (with no hard drive) to write to a floppy. The ADF file is bigger than the space available on a PC formatted floppy.

BGary,
You may be able to use some type of split/join or ZIP (Zipping into two parts) commands. IIRC I used to have to do this but I cannot think of the actual utilities at the moment. A search of Aminet should find something.

UPDATE: just checked, there are some relatively new split/join utilities on Aminet that are multiplatform and should do the trick - if you have enough room in RAM to rejoin them and then run the ADF program. That may be your next hurdle.

Pete  :-)

[Flashlab]

When a floppy has less than 880kb left then there are damaged sectors on the disk that were labeled unusable  while formatting.

[amazing]

i recommend him to buy a a1200

[BGary335]

@amazing

Got $300US?

@everyone else

The RAM seems to be my trouble right now. Here's what's going on: on the motherboard, it says 512K/1M, so I would imagine that I have no less than 512K. Then I have a 512K expansion card, which SHOULD give me a total of 1024K. But when I try to put an ADF file in RAM it tells me that the RAM drive is full before the operation completes. I don't get it.

[AmigaPete]

Yes, the RAM drive will run out of room because the system itself is using a certain amount of memory due to processes run at bootup. I am not completely familiar with running a 1 MB machine (it has been a while) but I seem to recall that there are some tutorials out there that outline how to create a very memory light boot disk. Once you get that then you will probably have to use a command line version of the ADF-to-floppy program, as any sort of GUI interface will use memory. Hopefully some of the others may point you in the direction of where to find the info on creating the 'light' boot disk - I'm thinking it may be a simple as making a copy of the WB floppy and then editing the startup sequence and user-startup files.

Pete  :-)

[BGary335]

Anyone know anything about what Pete is talking about?

[madsjm]

Forget about ADF. If you're copying disk images to 720K PC floppies, use DMS. ADF is not a compressed format, but DMS is.

If you have 1 MB ram, you should be able to compress the ADF to DMS in Windows/UAE and copy it to a 720K PC floppy. Then you copy the DMS file to RAM: on the Amiga and unpack it to DF1:
I did this a lot on my A500. And if the DMS file for some reason is bigger than 720K, you can split it like I described.

BTW: Someone mentioned the Catweasel. Catweasel MK4 can read/write non-dos formats like games, trackload demos etc.
The new drivers and image tool work great! Whatever you've heard about poor drivers and lack of support for the Catweasel in the past (I've been one of the guys complaining), it's time to give it a try! It's simply an amazing piece of hardware.  :-)

[BGary335]

Alright, I want to try DMS. I'm not too familiar with UAE though. Can someone give me a rundown of what I need to do?

[adolescent]

Another option, as above, is to compress the ADF with GZip to make an ADZ file.  You need to make sure the program you're using to unpack/write the ADF to disk can support this though.   (I use Codetapper's diskwiz).  (Diskwiz can also write zipped files, although I haven't tried it out.)

An alternative is to use AmigaExplorer and a null modem cable to transfer the files from your PC directly to the Amiga's floppy.

[rkauer]

 I second adolescent.

 The best way to transfer an ADF image from the peecee to the Amiga is Amiga Explorer, from Cloanto.

 And this is a cheap program, BTW.

 Look at Amiga Explorer Home Page:rtfm:

[BGary335]

As I've said before, I haven't a null modem cable, so  that option isn't viable at this time.

[madsjm]

BGary335 wrote:
Alright, I want to try DMS. I'm not too familiar with UAE though. Can someone give me a rundown of what I need to do?

- Download WinUAE from http://www.winuae.net/
- Download DMS from http://aminet.net/util/arc/dms111.run
- Download kickstart rom, kick31.zip (buy it from Cloanto or Google it)
- Make a directory somewhere on your drive (e.g. c:\dh0) and put the dms111.run file there.
- Unpack the kick31.zip to somewhere
- Start WinUAE

- Change the following options:
 * ROM: Main ROM file: (open the kick31.rom you unpacked)
 * Hard drives: Add Directory or Archive:
          Device name: dh0
          Volume label: dh0
          Path: c:\dh0
          Read/Write (check)
          (click OK)

- Click start
- In AmigaDOS, type dms111.run
- Click F12 key

- Change the following options:
 * Floppy drives: DF0: (Click the button which says ... and find your adf)

- Click Open, and then OK, and you should be back into AmigaDOS
- Type "dms read name.dms" (without the quotes), where name.dms is the name of your dms file.
- Press the Return key
- You should now have a name.dms in c:\dh0 which you can copy to a 720K floppy and unpack on the Amiga.

[motorollin]

BGary335 wrote:
Anyone know anything about what Pete is talking about?

The RAM disk is a portion of the memory in your Amiga. So it is made up of some of the 1024k of RAM you have installed.

If you boot your Amiga to Workbench, the things that Workbench loads (icons, the interface etc etc) will eat in to your RAM and reduce the amount available to the RAM disk.

So Pete's suggestion is to boot with as little as possible running - ideally just a CLI prompt - so that as little RAM as possible is used up, thus allowing you to use more for the RAM disk.


Using DMS might not work very well if your ADFs are copy protected or Non-DOS, as I'm not sure whether DMS can image these disks. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.


Also, AFAIK you CAN use Amiga Explorer over a NULL modem cable. It will be a bit slow, but it will work.

[EDIT]
Null Modem cable in Amiga Explorer
[/EDIT]

--
moto

[madsjm]

motorollin wrote:

Using DMS might not work very well if your ADFs are copy protected or Non-DOS, as I'm not sure whether DMS can image these disks. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

This is wrong, at least about non-dos ADFs/floppies. And ADFs are never copy protected.

[motorollin]

Fair enough - thanks for the correction.

--
moto