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A friend of mine sold me an Amiga 500 with 512Kb RAM and one floppy drive,
a printer, some documentation, some games, some other software and luckily a
working copy of workbench 1.2. I wanted to play some games I found on the
internet, but I had no idea where to start.
After some searching I found transwarp
(http://homepage.uibk.ac.at/homepage/c725/c72578/amiga/)
and made the serial cross-cable, however, transwarp does not handle unformatted
disks very well and it is pretty slow. Another thing is that I could not find
a Linux version for the PC side.
Then I stumbled on GreG's PC-to-Amiga link page
(http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~craske/amiga/)
and made the parallel cross cable (well, not quite, but mine worked too),
however, pcget can not write directly to the floppy disk, which was just what
I needed, having no other temporary space. I first tried to chop up the images,
but I did not find that acceptable. So I installed UAE with NDK_3.1 and Dice
and began tinkering with the code. At first I attempted to merge pcget with the
relevant portions of transwarp, but the same problems arose again (unformatted
disks). Then I found a file called hd2f.c (http://wandel.ca/homepage/amiga_sw/)
which uses TD_FORMAT, this did work quite nice. At this point another friend of
mine told me where to find the documentation of these functions (it was
somewhere in the NDK_3.1 tree), this was nice because there was still one
problem left.
For some reason the floppies I made did not work, so I made a debug version of
pcget, which writes some tracks, reads them back into another buffer and, if
the buffers are not equal, print out a nasty message and dumps the first forty
bytes of these buffers to the screen. I then found out that only track 0 went
wrong, and by looking at the data that was read back, I concluded that I had
a virus on my only boot disk. Luckily I found an anti-virus disk that came
with the Amiga and luckily it worked.
After getting rid of the virus, the modified pcget binary worked perfectly,
except that when I turned off the emulator (which made the load on my machine
drop), the amigaput binary became much faster and disconnected when the Amiga
started to write to the disk. So I tinkered with the amigaput program a bit, I
just increased some timeouts. By the way, I do not think that amigaput needs
to take 100% CPU time, but I did not want to rewrite the code.
So, there I was, I then made several copies of the workbench disk and started
playing. It takes about 1 minute and 50 seconds to transfer a disk image to
floppy. At this point I was satisfied so I did not made any more modifications.
It might be nice to make a version of amigaput that does not wait for
acknowledgements, just to get the pcget binary to the amiga with the type
command. It would eliminate the need for the serial cable. And maybe if
both programs are back-ported, the guys of UAE will include it in their next
version... just a thought.
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