Reading Amiga disks on a PC floppy drive

hamster

Has anyone ever tried copying the contents of their old amiga files (notes, projects... etc) to the PC?

I have been stumped until I came across this last night - DISK2FDI.ZIP

It's a shareware tool that requires you to boot up into a pure dos environment and allows you to read amiga floppy disks and copy the contents across to a 2nd floppy disk (and save it as a .adf - HD/DD) to use in your fave Amiga emulator.

You need to ahem... borrow another floppy drive and connect it temporarily to the same floppy drive cable (assign it B:) and put your destination disk in there and put your amiga original (write protect it!) in A:. Boot with a dos disk and run the disk2fdi file above (ignore the warning - it's means that you can't create an actual Amiga disk copy with this version - but you can create the .adf file - after which through the WinUAE emulator you can extract the files across to Windows (through a hardfile disk file for example).

This is great since I have many old files (paint files, 3D Construction Kit Projects etc which I haven't seen since 1993). T'is great!

Just wondering if anyone has does this already??? I'm going to try next weekend. Up to now I assumed you need a CatWeasel device to do this. The reason you can't read amiga natively, besides other things, is because the Amiga floppy drive rotated at 300rpm and the PC ones at 360rpm. The other thing is that the PC drive waits for a signal pulse before a read while the amiga one didn't which made a few bytes of a difference....

I have attached the program here if you want to try... again you need 2 floppy drives... read the readme in the .zip. It's the way it works. Also I pasted the main bit you need from the readme to do this too. By the way you use this program for the old commodore floppies and Apple disks too... but I'm only concerned with Amiga 3.5" disks.

Please let me know if you try it...

hamster

Here's the readme in the .zip above... the steps you need are at the section "Getting Started With 2 Disk Drives"... but give the readme a glance first.

SirLemonhead

Yup I tried it a few years ago. Worked pretty well and beats going and buying one of those expensive catweasel things (though those do let you write disks, but oh well)

SirLemonhead

I think the only real difference between amiga and pc drive controllers (the drives themselves are identical) is that the amiga doesn't create sectors on the disk...data is just written in one big long sector from start to end..or something?

hamster

Thanks for the confirmation MasterOfSolos!

I tried AmigaBoards and I'm told both Amiga and PC drives are identical except the PC controller itself is different. But that's great news... at least I can read the floppies... I really only want to access my old files from 10 years ago. Hope the floppies still work! Like opening a time capsule!

SirLemonhead

Good luck

Rambo

I hooked up a Amiga 600 up to serial port and using the program
Amiga explorer which I got from Amiga Forever I was able transfer my Amiga disks to adf format

i had to run AExplorer on the Amiga 600 and setup the connection speed
so Amiga and PC could talk together.

I open Amiga explorer from windows , I then had access to my rom files
and all of the floppy drives DF0 DF1 HD0 from the Amiga 600
which I could just copy and paste to the windows PC.

Edit
forget to but up link
http://www.amigaforever.com/ae/

hamster

An update...

Well, I tried copying my old amiga floppies today and I have had success! All my old files came across. I did a couple 3D Construction Kit games in 1992 and spent 6 months between two of them. I wanted to try them out. It's amazing I never thought I see them again.

On another note, I found my old Amiga power supply. Plug the A500 in and put in workbench 1.3 and it started booting up... looks like it works! There are 2 snags however...

1. I can't find the tv modulator (no way to get a picture now)
2. No amiga mouse

My current PC has a parallel port and I'm using winuae and have nearly ever Amiga game/utility/PD tool under it. Is it possible for me to communicate to the Amiga via the parallel or serial port? and blind on the Amiga side ? :eek:

Rambo

hamster wrote:

An update...

Well, I tried copying my old amiga floppies today and I have had success! All my old files came across. I did a couple 3D Construction Kit games in 1992 and spent 6 months between two of them. I wanted to try them out. It's amazing I never thought I see them again.


My current PC has a parallel port and I'm using winuae and have nearly ever Amiga game/utility/PD tool under it. Is it possible for me to communicate to the Amiga via the parallel or serial port? and blind on the Amiga side ? :eek:

The A500 has a Video out socket at the back. you will get Monochrome Composite Video Out which you should be able to connect to your TV.
using the scart socket.

the A600 I just hooked it up through the scart socket on my tv card


Question:
How long did it take to transfer disk image

hamster

Rambo, I thought that was mono sound... even though there was the stereo outputs as well.... Many Thanks for the tip!

>>Question:
>>How long did it take to transfer disk image
It took about 2 mins per disk. The copies work in Winuae. I checked about an hour ago.

I got it hooked up to a small monitor via a phono cable. I'm quivering with excitement so I'm not thinking too clearly right now!

I'll load up some faqs on how to communicate to the PC via the serial or parallel port. But would you recommend the parallel port if its faster, easier or more compatible to communciate to the PC (Win XP)? ie, could I access the amiga from the PC or would I be better to access the PC from the Amiga?

Sorry for the impatience.... I'll going to look up the faqs now...

Rambo

hamster wrote:

Rambo, I thought that was mono sound... even though there was the stereo outputs as well.... Many Thanks for the tip!

>>Question:
>>How long did it take to transfer disk image
It took about 2 mins per disk. The copies work in Winuae. I checked about an hour ago.

it takes around 3 mins using Amiga Explorer transfer.

I got it hooked up to a small monitor via a phono cable. I'm quivering with excitement so I'm not thinking too clearly right now!

I'll load up some faqs on how to communicate to the PC via the serial or parallel port. But would you recommend the parallel port if its faster, easier or more compatible to communciate to the PC (Win XP)? ie, could I access the amiga from the PC or would I be better to access the PC from the Amiga?

Sorry for the impatience.... I'll going to look up the faqs now...

it takes around 3 mins using Amiga Explorer to transfer a disk
but great because I load it into winuae straight away
I have around 300 disks which I converted to adf from magazine to games
Amazing to load up some of your old games positions from the 88-90S
I have some orignal games that I could not transfer over because of copy
protecting on them DAME::
You may better look with DISK2FDI

I have always used the serial port for communicate Using a program called Ncomm2 which was great for dialing out to the Bulletin Boards
WHAT MEMORIES
This program could be used to transfer files from amiga to PC but a llittle
messy using a null modem cable. I have done this untill I came across Amiga Explorer..
This too uses the null modem cable.