Amiga Workbench 3 1 Adf Serials
[UPDATE] I've just received feedback for using the kit with AMIGA 500+: Transfer times are reduced ~50% against AMIGA 500! You can copy an adf image to the disk in just 75 seconds!! (Finally found something that ECS chipset along with kickstart 2.0 made a REAL difference from OCS kick 1.3: I/O ports work faster! ) If you happen to have a 'humble' Amiga 500 like myself,without any 'serious' addons (except maybe from an extra 512k ram and a 2nd floppy.) you would probably tempted many times by the numerous games that are widely availiable today, in the form of adf images,and how you could enjoy them on your beloved A500. Or perhaps, you have some programs or games (even saved games. ) that you'd like to transfer them as adf images and use them with winuae or just take adf backups!
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Up untill now, the options we have where: 1) Use a serial cable and some porgram like amiga explorer which is probably rather easy procedure, but,unfortunately the poor 68000/7.16Mhz of an A500 can't give you nothing faster than 19.2kbps transfer rate e.g. At least 8 MINUTES to transfer one adf image!!! 2)Use some floppy emu with sd card.Again,this 'solution' is rather expensive (~90euro),and it doesn't give you any noticeable speed improvement,as the use of a fast sd card might suggest,the speed of amiga accessing adf images on sd card, is more or less of a classic floppy disk drive. 3)Use a CATWEASEL MK4 PLUS PCI card.Of course this card can do much more than transfer adf files to amiga disks, and for that, it's rather expensive too (~120euro including postage) Having to face this situation, i decided to try and 'fill the gap' between the cheap but slow serial transfer 'solution', and the fast but expensive floppy emu or catweasel pci card alternative. After a lot of searching,testing and programming, i've come up with a 'solution' that, not only combines the cheap cost of the serial cable with MUCH more transfer speed,but also, is SUPER easy and simple to do it! FIRST THE 'INGRIDIENTS' for the.' Recipe': 1) An amiga 500 and it's psu.Frankly you wont be needing ANYTHING else for the procedure,not even a monitor or tv connected to your amiga!(extremely usefull if there is a realtive big distance between your amiga and pc or if you dont have enough space for the monitor near your pc) 2) A PC running windows (XP,VISTA,7 32bit or 64bit) equiped with a parallel port..
3) A special kit i make, where you can find it. Kit includes a special custom made parallel cable and 1 amiga boot disk.There are 2 versions of the kit, with or without a pci parallel card in case your pc doesn't have one on board. Also,bellow i give you all the neccesary info to try and make it yourself too! 4) Many amiga formated 3.5' disks to transfer your beloved games adf images! Also you will need one of these.
Download the appropriate file according to your windows version (adf_transfer_32 for 32bit windows and adf_transfer_64 for 64bit windows) and uncompress it anywhere in your hard disk. Now for the 'cooking': FOR TRANSFERRING ADF IMAGES FROM THE PC TO AMIGA 500: 1) Connect amiga and pc with the cable (beware to plug the right end on each side,if you put it either way it will not work!) 2) Power on your amiga 3) Insert the boot disk of the kit, and wait untill floppy led turns off 4) Insert the first empty amiga disk. 5) Go to the uncompressed folder and Run adf_transfer.exe. Download Ratchet And Clank 2 For Pc. (on windows vista/7 you must 'run as administrator') 6) Press 'open file' button and select the adf image you want to transfer 7) Press 'transfer' button. 8 )On the cli window that will appear on you screen of your pc, you watch the procedure of the transfer. For an adf image it will take about 1 minute and 50seconds!! The automatic step procedure i describe above, is for transfer adf images only.I did that in order to simplify and 'automate' the hole procedure as much as possible, and also because i think that adf image transfer is what most people want BUT, the paradise dos utility,which is actually doing the transfers, can be used for any kind of transfers, stand alone files, or even hole directories (i mention that on my ebay listing too).
Inside the adf_transfer folder you will find the paradise.doc document that explains how to use paradise utility manually on both amiga and pc.It's like using a common dos command with various parameters. Now,if you are planning to use 32bit version of adf_transfer you must also check Cli_usage_of_paradise_on_windows.txt,which explains in 2 words how to use manually paradise under windows xp,vista,7. If you are planing to use 64bit version of adf_transfer then you must use paradise through dosbox svn daum (which is also included in the 'dosbox' subfolder). You must also configure the dosbox's config file ('dosbox.conf') in order to enable parallel port usage through dosbox. (open dosbox.conf with notepad, go down to [parallel] section,and follow the instructions given there).
Quote: As for the 'thing' you said, i included an adf image of xcopy under the 'Usefull adf images' subdir of the adf transfer program. Using xcopy is the most fast and easy way to format amiga disks! It takes ~35seconds to format a disk, and if you happen to have a second floppy drive,you can format 2 disks at the same time! Ah - excellent - I have to admit I haven't investigated the ADF images yet.
Since i had a whole batch to format, and no blanks at all that were already formatted, I booted with the floppy supplied with the kit and did this: >Ctrl-D >Esc >Return (Breaks out of the program on the disk) >copy df0:system/format ram: >ram: (eject boot disk, insert disk to be formatted) >format drive df0: name Empty (repeat the last line as necessary.) Worked a treat - (though tedious to type on an A500 plus whose key caps are currently being Retrobrited!). Ah - excellent - I have to admit I haven't investigated the ADF images yet. Well I've just stopwatched it on my A500+ and it took about 1.53 - similar to the claimed speed for an A500. Maybe the transfer speed varies from PC to PC? Izotope Keygen Download there. That's still an impressive result though - great kit From my experience, transfers on 32bit OS are a bit faster than on 64bit (~20%), as it's more 'direct' in the first case (on 32bit paradise runs directly through cli where on 64bit runs through the special version of dosbox as this was the only way i managed to make it work on 64bit OS).
Of course speed may vary a little even from pc to pc. Anyway, good thing is that, up until now, all kits i gave works fine for everyone! The specific cable might use parallel port but it's NOT a typical parallel cable. Obviously the guy who made it many years ago is using a custom way of his own for managing transfer thus the 'strange' wiring you mention!
When you insert boot disk, it just runs automatically paradise utility and waits for connection. But you really shouldn't care at all of what happening on the amiga side. Apart from changing disks you don't do nothing else! I have design the hole procedure to be as simple and easy as possible. You will not need even a monitor connected to your amiga!
In practice amiga is like a 'slave drive' connected to the pc via parallel port! I make this kit mainly for A500's where,if i'm not mistaken,cross dos can't run on a plain A500 with 512k ram (paradise can transfer disks even on an ancient AMIGA 1000 with 256k RAM, as it does not copy hole disk to ram but only 4 sectors at a time e.g. Only 44kb ram needed) Anyway, even if you can use cross dos on any amiga 500, i never said ABSOLUTE 'cheapest'. I said 'Fastest,Easiest,Cheapest' combined! That is, considering easy of use combined with speed you get, it's definitely the cheapest way to do it! You insert the boot disk in amiga.Wait 10seconds for drive to stop. Then with a couple of mouse clicks on your windows xp/7/64bit/32bit pc, you select the adf file you want to transfer and press a button!
From then, it's only a matter of selecting adf files and changing disks in you amiga drive! Pretty much easier and faster than ' 720k PC disk, ZIP, and crossdos' method don't you think?