Amiga Roms And Christmass Prezzy

[pubzombie]

Hi Guys,
hope you can help me here and that I am not in the wrong forum. I have been running lots of amiga games under emulation on my gp2x over the last year so my girlfriend brought me an amiga 1200 from amigakit.co.uk . Its the basic model with the floppy drive and psu. I have some formated disks but just want to know if anybody has any experience of this? or can you point me in the correct direction of someone who has. Can i simply copy my roms that i use for my gp2x to floppies using my desktop pc? will that work or because the amiga has different formating do i need to do something else? or is it impossible? I have plenty of original amiga games on disks but do not want to put the original disks into my new amiga as they have been stored in my dads loft and are heavily degraded; i would like to use a spare pc floopy drive to copy them to new floppies.
hope you can help and happy holidays to all
pub x

 

[Dunny]

Its the basic model with the floppy drive and psu. I have some formated disks but just want to know if anybody has any experience of this? or can you point me in the correct direction of someone who has. Can i simply copy my roms that i use for my gp2x to floppies using my desktop pc? will that work or because the amiga has different formating do i need to do something else? or is it impossible?

It's supremely difficult. You can't reflash the Amiga ROM chips, so you can't use your ROM images, sorry. Your disks can be transferred, but it's a very involved process. You'll need a Hard Drive inside your Miggy (or Compact Flash etc), and a null-modem cable from your PC ports to your Amiga port. You can transfer the disk images to your Hard drive, and use an application like DMS to write them back to floppies.

The PC cannot easily write amiga disks without additional hardware, the controller isn't really up to it.

If you do decide to get a Hard Disk, I'd recommend that you pay for a copy of WHDLoad for the Amiga - all your games can be downloaded and stored/run from your hard drive.

D.

 

[christo930]

Hi Guys,
hope you can help me here and that I am not in the wrong forum. I have been running lots of amiga games under emulation on my gp2x over the last year so my girlfriend brought me an amiga 1200 from amigakit.co.uk . Its the basic model with the floppy drive and psu. I have some formated disks but just want to know if anybody has any experience of this? or can you point me in the correct direction of someone who has. Can i simply copy my roms that i use for my gp2x to floppies using my desktop pc? will that work or because the amiga has different formating do i need to do something else? or is it impossible? I have plenty of original amiga games on disks but do not want to put the original disks into my new amiga as they have been stored in my dads loft and are heavily degraded; i would like to use a spare pc floopy drive to copy them to new floppies.
hope you can help and happy holidays to all
pub x

The Amiga 1200 can read pc floppies and can read compact flash cards with a pcmcia adapter which can be found dirt cheap. You can even drop your hard disk directories from winuae onto the cf card and drop it on the hard disk. You can take your adf files and use lha compression and put the lha file of the adf file on a pc formatted 720k disk and then drop it in the ram disk and us lha to expand it back to adf and then use an adf writer to write the disk. The CF card and pcmcia adapter is the best way to do it though, since an amiga 1200 only has 2mb of ram. You can put just about any notebook hard disk in itl They use standard 2 1/2' hard disks.

Chris

 

[Iorgy77]

http://eab.abime.net

One of us! One of us! One of us!

Forget adf files, get yourself a HDD and discover the world of whdloaded games. You will never turn back. The HDD drive is just a 2.5 laptop HDD or a CF card with the correct adapter. Hell you can even buy a cheap old pcmcia network card (certain model net cards only) and get the thing on your home network or the internet.

 

[Squidge]

I agree, the best way to go is to get a cheap harddisk. I remember modifying my Amiga so it could use 3.5" HDs (the case still ended up with a slight curve on it though) as it was much cheaper, about £150 for 40MB.

I've no idea of what the limitations of the Amiga are for harddisks now, but I do know you can get a 150GB 2.5" drive for less than £40.

To transfer images from the PC to the Amiga you can use a null modem cable, parallel cable (plus appropriate software) or SneakerNet. Since you already have all your roms, I'd go for the later, as it could be done in one operation.

 

[pubzombie]

HI Guys.
cheers but i am a little slow - i play games and then think i am clever when i write gumph about them!
thanx for your replies - i am not going to start to pretend i understood all that but i get a bit; I can play games so I am going to ask for a bit more advice if you don't mind? and i am going to have a fish around on the net.
My beloved brought me the last of the old produced 'new' 'unused' Amiga1200 from amigakit.co.uk. It came without a mouse or the operating system - as she is not at all computer game minded, when asked if i needed an OS installed she told them 'NO' as 'i do it all the time??????' in fact she hates me playing games so she brought me my favourite ever system. i dont understand women!!!! I called mat at amigakit.co.uk and he advised me to start off with the following

operating system 3.1 comes on 6 disks - i presume this is workbench etc? will i need to install this every time i boot the machine? will i need a hard disk to get over this? is the OS installed on a chip in the original machine?

a mouse of course!

an easy adf transfer kit with 1 gig card - now this baffles me a bit - does it not work similar to a hard disk any way? can i use whdload with this - bear in mind i dont know what whdload really is?

a luverley jubberley kempston joystick!

a hard disk seems a good idea from what u guys say so i will order one next week, if i can build my own pc i take it i can install a pre formated and partitioned drive? what else do i need to use 'whdload' to import my games from pc to hd? and why?

i loved my amigas in the 1990s so this is going to be a full on obsession and i would like to get to know other like minded nutters - i just need a little prod in the right directions.

almost done - should I accelerate my amiga 1200 does this make it 32bit? am i mad?

I am but in your shadows


finally i would also like to start collecting the games again - my boxes floppies and instructions are a mouldy mess so if you can help me out buying games PM me. - anything by Julian Gollup, Andrew 'paradroid' Braybrook, Team 17 and Microprose is a must!!!
once again thank you very very much
i couldnt sleep last night - i feel 15 years younger and DUMBER
pub x

 

[pubzombie]

my amiga - she looks so sexy

 

[Squidge]

operating system 3.1 comes on 6 disks - i presume this is workbench etc? will i need to install this every time i boot the machine? will i need a hard disk to get over this? is the OS installed on a chip in the original machine?

'Install' isn't the correct word, but you will need to boot from the Workbench disk should you wish to use any of the programs on it, or the other 5 disks. Games normally have part of the Workbench already on them, so you don't need it for these (any ADF you run directly in an Amiga emulator you can run from power-up on the Amiga itself). You can install the 6 disks onto an appropriate harddisk if you buy one, so you don't need the disks again.
The OS installed on a chip inside the machine is 'Kickstart', which is basically the machines basic routines (such as reading/writing to disks, etc).

an easy adf transfer kit with 1 gig card - now this baffles me a bit - does it not work similar to a hard disk any way? can i use whdload with this - bear in mind i dont know what whdload really is?

I don't know about 'easy adf transfer kit', but my advice above was to connect an Amiga formatted harddisk to your PC and copy your ADFs on to it, and then reinstall into an Amiga (SneakerNet). whdload will allow you to install games not designed to run from a harddisk to do exactly that.

almost done - should I accelerate my amiga 1200 does this make it 32bit? am i mad?

For best compatability, your best keeping your Amiga 'virgin'. Upgrading ram and making it faster just causes problems with some games. The vast majority don't require them anyway (and those that do are normally better played on a PC anyway, such as Doom rip-offs).

 

[Iorgy77]

almost done - should I accelerate my amiga 1200 does this make it 32bit? am i mad?

For best compatability, your best keeping your Amiga 'virgin'. Upgrading ram and making it faster just causes problems with some games. The vast majority don't require them anyway (and those that do are normally better played on a PC anyway, such as Doom rip-offs).

Whdload will work so much better with an 030 accelerator and some extra memory. Playing games from the floppy drive would be better without though. You can always disable the 030 at boot up if you really need to. (You never will )

if you are after an accelerator but dont want to get burned on ebay check out www.amibay.com

 

[pubzombie]

thanks guys
love ya

 

[christo930]

I agree, the best way to go is to get a cheap harddisk. I remember modifying my Amiga so it could use 3.5" HDs (the case still ended up with a slight curve on it though) as it was much cheaper, about £150 for 40GB.

I've no idea of what the limitations of the Amiga are for harddisks now, but I do know you can get a 150GB 2.5" drive for less than £40.

To transfer images from the PC to the Amiga you can use a null modem cable, parallel cable (plus appropriate software) or SneakerNet. Since you already have all your roms, I'd go for the later, as it could be done in one operation.



A stock amiga 1200 can use a 4gb hard disk. If you check aminet, I am willing to bet that there is software there that will allow you to use larger hard disks.

I used to us null modem cable, then I upgraded to ethernet then I got smart and got a compact flash card and a pcmcia adapter. I have a card reader/writer for the pc and I drop files on it, then put it in the adapter and fire up the miggy and it mounts just like a hard disk (after you do a 1 time driver install available from aminet). It works fast and I can run it right from the cf card and if everything is kosher, I stick it on my amiga hard disk.
Using whdload, I have hundreds of games on my Amiga with no need to have thousands of floppies laying around. They take up way too much room and are slow as shit.

 

[Squidge]

A stock amiga 1200 can use a 4gb hard disk.
typo?

 

[j.pickens]

A stock amiga 1200 can use a 4gb hard disk.
typo?

I think not.
I haven't done anything with Amiga since my 1000 back in the '80's.
However, I remember buying an 80 Mb SCSI hard drive and adaptor for it.
Had to break it into two 40 Mb partitions.
The SCSI adaptor and hard drive cost me around $400.

Let's see, $400 / 80 Mb = $5 per Megabyte.

I just saw 1 Tb hard drives selling for $80.

$80 / 1000000 Mb = $0.00008 per Megabyte.

An improvement of 6250000% in 20 year's time.

 

[Iorgy77]

I think what he means is with no patches and the default filesystem your partitions are limited to 4gb, although I thought it was 8gb for OS3.1.

 

[pubzombie]

hi guys . thanx for the time you spent replyin to my posts. i have just got in from work and a package from amigakit is here already. will tell you how it goes
pub x

ps j.pickens you had an Amiga1000 - wow i am impressed
you still got it?

 

[benjymous]

A stock amiga 1200 can use a 4gb hard disk.
typo?

You can actually get bigger than that - 4gb is the largest partition size it can handle, but you can split a larger drive up into a few 4gb partitions (I had a 13gb drive in my machine back in the day...)

Another option people haven't mentioned is the use of 720k floppies (if you can find any!) - an adf should zip down to less than 720k, so you can copy it to an msdos formatted low density floppy, boot the amiga, mount the msdos disk, copy the zip to the ram drive, unzip, and extract the adf back onto another disk. A bit long winded, but it'll work if you haven't got a hard drive.

 

[pubzombie]

A stock amiga 1200 can use a 4gb hard disk.
typo?

You can actually get bigger than that - 4gb is the largest partition size it can handle, but you can split a larger drive up into a few 4gb partitions (I had a 13gb drive in my machine back in the day...)

Another option people haven't mentioned is the use of 720k floppies (if you can find any!) - an adf should zip down to less than 720k, so you can copy it to an msdos formatted low density floppy, boot the amiga, mount the msdos disk, copy the zip to the ram drive, unzip, and extract the adf back onto another disk. A bit long winded, but it'll work if you haven't got a hard drive.


its all Greek to me, but i am going to order a hard disk and more memory from amigakit.co.uk. I feel the need to get geek with this and get it on my network at home and perhaps on the net too. any ideas or advice welcome.
HAPPY NEW YEAR GUYS
pz X

 

[Squidge]

Oops, I've just noticed I put 40GB above for my first hard drive. Obviously this was a typo, and I meant 40MB. It just feels so weird now typing something like that - I automatically think it's wrong and correct it!

This is the same reason I thought 4GB was a typo. 4GB would actually make sense, per partition, as it's the size of an unsigned 32-bit integer.

 

[christo930]

A stock amiga 1200 can use a 4gb hard disk.
typo?

You can actually get bigger than that - 4gb is the largest partition size it can handle, but you can split a larger drive up into a few 4gb partitions (I had a 13gb drive in my machine back in the day...)

Another option people haven't mentioned is the use of 720k floppies (if you can find any!) - an adf should zip down to less than 720k, so you can copy it to an msdos formatted low density floppy, boot the amiga, mount the msdos disk, copy the zip to the ram drive, unzip, and extract the adf back onto another disk. A bit long winded, but it'll work if you haven't got a hard drive.

Is there any additional software needed to use a disk bigger than 4gb? IDE had a 4gb maximum size for a long time and when they broke the 4gb barrier it usually needed a special driver to get the machine to recognize it (not the smaller partitions, but the full size of the drive) or does it just work as long as you partition the drive with partitions of under 4gb? Does the standart partitioning software recognize the larger drive sizes? I think I have a 6gb 2.5 drive around, maybe I'll putz around with mine. Would I need any aminet software?

Chris