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Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 9:19 pm
by Iain
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... ;-)

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2014 2:39 pm
by Iain
I found an ANSI viewer / converter for the PC, which allows me to show you my BBS ANSI main menu. Rather good it looked too!
The Highway To Hell BBS ANSI Main Menu
The Highway To Hell BBS ANSI Main Menu
Mainmenu.ansi.255.png (14.13 KiB) Viewed 49192 times

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2014 6:54 pm
by andy vaisey
Tidy!

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2014 8:42 pm
by Iain
Tidy? What does that mean young man? A new slang word for nice? ;-)

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2014 6:42 pm
by andy vaisey
Iain wrote:Tidy? What does that mean young man? A new slang word for nice? ;-)
Bit of valleys boy coming out in me. That would be a 'Welshism', meaning nice, cool, good, pleasing, etc!

Iain, you run a tidy website.

Mort, tidy job on scanning all those mags.

Spectrum... nasty... ;)

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Sat Jan 11, 2014 12:13 am
by Iain
Good to know then, when I'm next in the hills and Valleys of Wales!

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Sat Jan 11, 2014 8:04 pm
by andy vaisey
Iain wrote:Good to know then, when I'm next in the hills and Valleys of Wales!
Tidy.

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Fri Jan 17, 2014 7:58 pm
by RichH6109
Highway to Hell BBS? That rings a few bells. I think I spent most of my time on a BBS called Junction 9 (?)

I wonder if I still have my old Supra 2400 baud modem somewhere?

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Fri Jan 17, 2014 8:25 pm
by Iain
I off loaded my 2400 modem to a mate in college many, many years ago. I still had my Zoom (I think) 28K but I think I threw that out a couple of years ago...

The Highway to Hell was in Ireland so unless you were there you probably didn't call it. It wasn't so good that people would have paid international call charges to use it!! I'm assuming you would have paid international call charges however. ;-)

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 2:23 pm
by Iain
Some more notes for me in relation to backing up and restoring on real Amiga to CF card (from http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=53071)

From mfilos on EAB
LHA utility is enough mate.

Just open a CLI and type:
Code:

1> DH0:
1> lha -aezrx a DH1:backup.lha #?

That will create a file called "backup.lha" under partition DH1 (assuming the partition you want to backup is partition DH0) maintaining all protection bits etc.
The archive is not compressed so it will be rather large. If you want to make it compressed also just replace "z" with "Z" in lha options of the command provided.
Then of course you can transfer the one lha file via FTP or any other way anywhere

To restore the archive anytime just use the following command:
Code:

1> DH0:
1> lha x DH1:backup.lha
I am currently extracting by lha x -a which is meant to keep attributes.

I tried to mount the archives in WinUAE and copy them over in there with "copy all clone dh2: dh0:" etc. but the file dates were lost, even although they can be seen in the archive when viewing it through Total Commander.

I got the Amigakit CF HD kit with a 3 socket IDE cable but I can't have the CF card adaptor and my old 2.5" HD connected at the same time, even with changing master / slave jumpers. I guess my HD just doesn't like it, because it is meant to work. If it did I could have just copied straight over form old HD to new CF one on the Amiga.

My original plan when buying it was to keep my old HD as the master and have the CF card as the slave to have all the WHDLoad stuff on it, but then I thought it's a bit pointless still having the old small HD there when the CF card is so big... so just as well my idea changed since I can't have the two of them on the bus at the same time anyway.

My brain is starting to hurt a bit now but hopefully the lha extract will do the trick :)

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 11:17 am
by Iain
Well I got it all working in the end and am now copying over WHDLoad games onto the external CF and unlhaing them onto the internal one. Nice to have games working on the A1200 that I could never play back in the day due to KS3 incompatibilities etc.!

Here's a very retro photo I took a few weeks ago when first getting the CF card working in the PCMCIA slot.
Downloading in NComm from my 1999 Win98 laptop!
Downloading in NComm from my 1999 Win98 laptop!
NComm.jpg (207.93 KiB) Viewed 49120 times

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2014 10:12 pm
by andy vaisey
Cool!

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2016 12:06 pm
by Iain
I'm doing similar to another A1200 and my notes above certainly helped!

Just some more notes to self:

When installing a new CF HD in the Amiga, use HDInstTools in manual mode (change it in the prefs), that then displays all the format etc. options.

Good info in this thread: http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=51680

I think I forgot about setting a boot option.

Re: Bringing my Amiga into the 21st Century!

Posted: Thu Oct 10, 2019 12:18 pm
by Iain
Using a new blank CF card in the A1200 again, going to do a clean install for a nice WHDLoad system.

Just another note to self:

To install WB on a new formatted etc. CF card, boot from the WB floppy and then load c/OS-Install form the AmigaKit OS-Install disk. If you boot form the OS-Install disk is looks for a non existent device.