I will be jumping on the Amiga boat so hard it capsizes. Hoping to pick up a 1200 for cheap while I'm in Europe this summer. They're harder to find in the US.
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New York City
arfink, interesting, redirecting the input from the serial device to a disk.
it should be fucking annoying but good for the first disk.
The program TRANSDISK is NOT part of Workbench. It's a software you download. There is no way to write an image to disk with the tools provided with Workbench. So I guess one has to use that second method. It's not THAT bad.
Then again, if you have no Workbench disk.... chicken and egg.
Last edited by akira^8GB (May 11, 2010 2:57 am)
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Minneapolis
akira^8GB wrote:
arfink, interesting, redirecting the input from the serial device to a disk.
it should be fucking annoying but good for the first disk.The program TRANSDISK is NOT part of Workbench. It's a software you download. There is no way to write an image to disk with the tools provided with Workbench. So I guess one has to use that second method. It's not THAT bad.
Then again, if you have no Workbench disk.... chicken and egg.
Well, you got to remember, I'm not an Amiga user. Or even an Amiga owner. As for transferring from serial to disk on the A2, it can indeed take a bit. The first round isn't even from serial to disk though, it's from serial straight to the in-RAM assembler, from which it is immediately excecuted. You can save the bootloader to disk after it's all done. Kinda nifty.
However, since the vast majority of Apple II software is on 5.25 disks which amount to 160kb or less that usually isn't too bad, it's the big 800kb disks for the IIgs which take a while. Even at 19200 baud, which is above spec, an 800kb disk image takes 5 minutes or so. Of course, I decided to spring for a compact flash hard disk adapter for my IIgs which makes transfers somewhat less slow, but the process of opening the IIgs up, pulling the drive, moving it to my PC, adding the data, and getting everything put back together again takes about as long as making another floppy. So I normally reserve that kind of work for major operations that involve many megabytes of data.
Anyways, I'm getting off topic. Good luck with jumping on the boat!
Last edited by arfink (May 11, 2010 3:22 am)
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hardcore, Australia
I picked it up this afternoon. They gave me 2 A500s and an external drive for one of them. Amongst the bucket of disks they gave me I've found about 30 copies of workbench 1.3.something and a bunch of porn.
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New York City
Lucky man!
Cheers to you.
Check the RECOMMENDED LINKS bit on this very forum. You'll have every Amiga resource you may find (I should update it with some more info)
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hardcore, Australia
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So one of the a500s wouldn't start up so I opened it up today and decided to salvage a bunch from it.
I discovered they both had ram upgrades but they are both different. Any idea if one is better than the other?
Also i have an a590 drive, would it be possible to use some kind of scsi>compact flash magic to be able to do snazzy things?
(and anyone up for a spare a500 keyboard or chipset? i figured i'd take what i could from the non working machine)
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New York City
First of all, your AMiga could be salvaged. Not starting up could be fauty capacitors, ICs not seated properly, an easy fix. DO NOT strip it as parts unless you are totally sure.
Now onto the expansions.
The first one is a Microbotocs M501. Standard fare: 512KB RAM of Chip RAM, batter backed-up clock.
Second one is a Baseboard. 4MB of Fast RAM. Battery backed up clock.
So the second one is better, but also might introduce compatibility problems with certain software.
I am not 100% sure about SCSI-CF, because CF is basically IDE standard, so you would be looking at a SCSI-IDE->CF solution which I don't know if it exists.
Quick google search: http://www.pc-pitstop.com/scsi_ide_adapters/
Expensive.
Last edited by akira^8GB (Jun 6, 2010 4:49 pm)