Can I make Amiga floppies on a Mac?

[Huxley_D]

Hi guys,

I recently picked up a fairly worn A500, which came with tons of game disks (upwards of 70!), but no GUI or OS disks.  Since I've got plenty of old Macs (with floppy drives) around, I'm wondering if there might be a way to take a disk image (say a Kickstart GUI disk) from the web, put it onto an older Mac, and use the Mac to make a floppy that the A500 can read?  I did something similar a while back with my Apple IIgs, so it came to mind in this case.

Any thoughts or suggestions, or should I start panhandling for an OS floppy?

Thanks,

Huxley

[RRunner]

I've never heard of anyone being able to write Amiga formatted disks on a Mac or a PC. I think that there is an add-on PCI card or something that you can get called CatWeasle that you put in a PC that allows you to read/write Amiga floppies...

Note that once you get your Amiga up and running you can use tools such as CrossDOS to read / write PC formatted floppies on the Amiga.

[Huxley_D]

Cool, that about settles it then.

So, with that being the case, can anyone share some ideas or tricks to get a Workbench disk these days?  I spent the morning on a work-related conference call, to to keep myself awake, I tore down the A500, and found several interesting things:

1:  For a machine without fans, this thing had an absolutely astonishing amount of dust and lint inside!

2:  The reason many of the included game disks weren't working seems to have been the huge lint-ball trapped inside the floppy drive, and

3:  This 500 seems to be a Rev. 5 motherboard, and looks to have a 512k RAM expansion in the underside-bay.  The module is completely sealed inside a metal cage, so I can't see the circuit board inside, but it looks an awful lot like some pics I've seen of similar RAM modules.

Thanks for the continued support of this Amiga noob!

Huxley

[amigadave]

No, you cannot write AmigaOS floppies on your old Macs.  The Amiga floppies are 880kb, where the old Mac floppies are 800kb.

You can find the floppies you need at eBay, AmiBay, and a few other places.

Downloading the images from the Net is not legal either, as just like any MacOS (was MacOS7 freely released?), the IP has not been released as freeware.  Any help toward getting a download cannot be discussed on these forums as there are strict rules against any kind of piracy here.

There is a device, a floppy controller, that can be installed in a PCI slot of a Windows PC, called the "Catweasle" that can read and write Amiga disk files (adf's).  I don't know if the Catweasle can work in a Mac, but do a search on it and you should find all the info you need.

[tribz]

amigadave wrote:

Downloading the images from the Net is not legal either, as just like any MacOS (was MacOS7 freely released?), the IP has not been released as freeware.  Any help toward getting a download cannot be discussed on these forums as there are strict rules against any kind of piracy here.

Dont think OP indicated he was going to do that but I wonder whats the state of play with using the ADF images from a legally purchased Amiga Forever installation?

[Speelgoedmannetje]

You'll need a catweasel controller. Workbench images come with the AmigaForever package from Cloanto.
Besides, the OS is on ROM, you won't need to start your games using a workbench disk.

[amyren]

This is from announcement on individual computers website, published in 2004:

"The Catweasel MK4 has drivers for Linux, Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP, and Amiga OS 4; additionally, the intention is to support Mac OS X at a later date."

There was an update of the driver software in september 2007, but it looks like there still is no mac driver available.
Maybe the card can work in a mac with a pc emulator, if there is a pc emulator on the mac that is capable of accessing pci slots directly?

[Huxley_D]

Hmm, then that raises an interesting question:  A large number of the disks I got with the machine don't do anything when I insert them at bootup - the screen just keeps showing the "Insert Disk" graphic.  This doesn't happen with all disks though - maybe 50-60% though.  Does this mean that many of my disks are bad?  I guess I'd assumed that I wouldn't be able to run them without a GUI disk.

Huxley

[mpiva]

Huxley_D wrote:
Hmm, then that raises an interesting question:  A large number of the disks I got with the machine don't do anything when I insert them at bootup - the screen just keeps showing the "Insert Disk" graphic.  This doesn't happen with all disks though - maybe 50-60% though.  Does this mean that many of my disks are bad?  I guess I'd assumed that I wouldn't be able to run them without a GUI disk.

Huxley

MOST game disks are bootable; you can plug them in at the insert disk screen and you're good to go.  However, the ones that won't boot aren't necessarily bad.  Some games (and most application disks) will require you to boot with a Workbench disk first.  Then you'll need to stick in the other disk and use the GUI to open the disk and double-click on the appropriate icon.

[Colani1200]

Huxley_D wrote:
A large number of the disks I got with the machine don't do anything when I insert them at bootup - the screen just keeps showing the "Insert Disk" graphic.  This doesn't happen with all disks though - maybe 50-60% though.  Does this mean that many of my disks are bad?

Maybe they're just not bootable.

What Kickstart version is shown on the "insert disk" screen? You can get OS 2.1 disks / manuals brand new from e.g. Vesalia

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Huxley_D wrote:
Hmm, then that raises an interesting question:  A large number of the disks I got with the machine don't do anything when I insert them at bootup - the screen just keeps showing the "Insert Disk" graphic.  This doesn't happen with all disks though - maybe 50-60% though.  Does this mean that many of my disks are bad?  I guess I'd assumed that I wouldn't be able to run them without a GUI disk.

Huxley

Well, lots (most?) of games came on more than one disk :-)
Btw. there are loading screens which nowadays makes you think it's a major error (lots of flickering horizontal lines,  for example)

[Huxley_D]

I'll double-check later, but I'm pretty sure the graphic says Kickstart 1.3.  Does that make a difference, and also, are there ROM updates / upgrades for these machines?

Thanks!

[Speelgoedmannetje]

Huxley_D wrote:
I'll double-check later, but I'm pretty sure the graphic says Kickstart 1.3.  Does that make a difference,

Ehmm, you're sure the graphic doesn't say Workbench 1.3? (like, a white screen and a white hand holding a blue disk with workbench 1.3 on it?)

 and also, are there ROM updates / upgrades for these machines?

Thanks!

Yeps, there are. Though, there are quite a lot games incompatible with newer kickstarts. You might like to add a kickstart switch to keep compatibility.

[tribz]

Huxley_D wrote:
I'll double-check later, but I'm pretty sure the graphic says Kickstart 1.3.  Does that make a difference, and also, are there ROM updates / upgrades for these machines?

Thanks!

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Amiga-1-3-Set-of-Original-workbench-disks_W0QQitemZ300262106113QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item300262106113&_trkparms=72%3A1350|39%3A1|66%3A2|65%3A12|240%3A1318&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14

[Speelgoedmannetje]

like this: