How To.. Make Amiga Floppies?


skeezix

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A buddy of mine just acquired an Amiga 500 (North American), monitor, joystick/mouse, etc. No external hard drive IIRC. Most of the floppies long ago died to disk-rot, so I'm assuming he will imedaitely run into a problem..

- I forget offhand (never having been an amiga owner) if the OS is on ROM; I'm pretty sure you need a floppy to boot an A500, or a hard drive with workbench and all that on floppy/hdd .. so is he toast, to begin with?

Now, to write ADF files to floppies.. is it true to this day that you need to perform trickery on the amiga itself?
ie:
http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/3-118.html
and
http://www.amigawiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/ADF_to_Amiga_Disk
seem to suggest so.. sucks!

(With the ST, you can write a .MSA or .ST to a floppy using a PC, and be good to go right away.. especially with the OS in ROM, makes it a cakewalk.)

So all you Amiga experts..

How can my buddy get some crazy gaming on his new Miggy? :)

jeff

(BTW .. it has a 'mono' jack on the back; at a guess.. is this a mono composite TV connector? If so.. seriously, wtf? _mono_? :) Wow :p)
 
Well, I am no Amiga expert but ...

Kickstart should be preloaded in ROM. The screen showing the blue disk and hand should appear when he turns it on (or the purple screen with disk drive if Kickstart 2.0 or greater). Therefore, if he has Amiga disks he should be able to pop them in the drive and work away.

You are correct about Workdesk. This is on a floppy and needs to be loaded up. I looked into creating Amiga disks myself a while back from .adf's and discovered there was no easy way using just a PC. I have not checked it out recently but it looks like nothing has changed :(

This might seem like a real cheapo thing to do, but it worked for me! I put a couple of adds up on the internet looking for free Amiga games and disks. I got quite a few replies and I was able to pick up many disks (many original boxed games) for absolutely nothing! I live in Ireland, so I used www.buyandsell.ie and www.dublinwaste.ie - just a suggestion for your friend to do something similar. I was lucky enough to get Workbench, deluxepaint 3 etc also from people literally giving them away.

My Amiga is in storage at the moment so I can't check out the mono jack for you. I use a modulator (I think its called the A520) which allows connection to TV via standard RF cable. I don't know if this is required on NA models..
 
Interesting idea there :)

Passed along your post.

We'll see how interested and motivated he really gets .. its one thing to get a free Miggy, but its another to be a non Amiga person trying to sort out how to hook it up to a PC and do all that. But he is into the retro a little.. so I have hopes for him :)

Thanks!

jeff
 
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