Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!
Posted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 9:19 pm
All the talk about Putty Squad got me thinking into a CF card for a HD in my old Amiga 1200. I had researched them a year or two ago but never got around to getting one.
You can also get a compact flash adaptor for the PCMCIA slot. I have one of them for an old PC laptop and remember trying it years ago on the A1200 to see if it would work but it didn't seem to, so I thought I'd try again and finding a CardPrep program on System: somewhere I loaded that up and surprisingly it actually found the card and it's size and speed, but when I tried to format it, I got some write errors. I don't remember getting this far years ago but who knows...
Anyway with more research this time, I discovered the following program:
http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/cfd (use CompactFlash cards in your PCMCIA slot)
[edit] Moved to http://aminet.net/driver/media and there's a new version CFD133.lha [/edit]
which sounded promising, might save me having to buy a new PCMCIA adaptor and the Amiga. You also need to download and install:
http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/fat95.lha (Win95/98 compatible file system)
So how do I get these packages onto the Amiga? I don't have any PC with a floppy drive in it. So I remembered my old null modem cable and connected that up to my old 1999 PC laptop (it has a serial port!) and got them talking to each other and sent the files using ZModem and NComm on the Amiga end. Wow that brought back memories, seeing the ZModem dialog.
Installed the Fat95, although when I doubled clicked the install icon it didn't seem to do anything nor give any messages but it did install. Guess I'm used to modern day big install packages and tons of options to check etc.
Copied over the device driver to DEV: and double clicked on the CF0 file and bang, there was my CF card with the files in it showing!
So I know have a very handy way to get old files off the Amiga and new ones back to it!
Half the reason I'm writing all this here is in case I need to reference it again in the future.
It's kinda hard using the old Amiga Workbench, you notice a lot of things missing like tooltips and right click context menus. I guess Windows isn't all bad...
You can also get a compact flash adaptor for the PCMCIA slot. I have one of them for an old PC laptop and remember trying it years ago on the A1200 to see if it would work but it didn't seem to, so I thought I'd try again and finding a CardPrep program on System: somewhere I loaded that up and surprisingly it actually found the card and it's size and speed, but when I tried to format it, I got some write errors. I don't remember getting this far years ago but who knows...
Anyway with more research this time, I discovered the following program:
http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/cfd (use CompactFlash cards in your PCMCIA slot)
[edit] Moved to http://aminet.net/driver/media and there's a new version CFD133.lha [/edit]
which sounded promising, might save me having to buy a new PCMCIA adaptor and the Amiga. You also need to download and install:
http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/fat95.lha (Win95/98 compatible file system)
So how do I get these packages onto the Amiga? I don't have any PC with a floppy drive in it. So I remembered my old null modem cable and connected that up to my old 1999 PC laptop (it has a serial port!) and got them talking to each other and sent the files using ZModem and NComm on the Amiga end. Wow that brought back memories, seeing the ZModem dialog.
Installed the Fat95, although when I doubled clicked the install icon it didn't seem to do anything nor give any messages but it did install. Guess I'm used to modern day big install packages and tons of options to check etc.
Copied over the device driver to DEV: and double clicked on the CF0 file and bang, there was my CF card with the files in it showing!
So I know have a very handy way to get old files off the Amiga and new ones back to it!
Half the reason I'm writing all this here is in case I need to reference it again in the future.
It's kinda hard using the old Amiga Workbench, you notice a lot of things missing like tooltips and right click context menus. I guess Windows isn't all bad...