EasyADF PCMCIA?

[Toddney]

Hi,

I have just recently purchased an A600 from ebay, to replace my old one which stopped working a few weeks ago. I think the floppy drive was faulty but it was so scruffy anyway that a new A600 seemed more appealing.

It is coming with the standard setup, 1MB ram, no hard disk and no other extras.

I am now thinking of transferring files (some adf backups etc) from my PC to the A600. At first I thought of using the null modem cable etc, but then came across the EasyADF PCMCIA

Has anyone had any experience with this? If so, is it as easy as it sounds? Would I need a ram upgrade/hard disk in order to transfer ADF's and create the disks?

Any other suggestions are welcome,

Thanks,

Toddney

[Tiago]

I have one easyadf pcmcia for my A1200.
It works fine. It is very easy to work with.
It is a simple card pcmcia with a converter to a compaq flash. You just need to put one compaq flash card (i use a 256mb one) and use or install the floppy that comes with easyadf. This disk is bootable so you do not need HD, but if you have, better.
The software is very simple to use, just run the program it will detact the pcmcia and will show you the adfs inside. You can transform 1 adf from pcmcia to floppy or vice-versa. It is very very simple to work.
But if you dont have an HD and no more then 1MB of RAM i dont know if you will be able to use it because the software will use some memory and the adf is 800kb so... i dont know. ask in amikit.com, i bought it there, they should know the answer.

But if it's easy, yes it is easy and fast!!

[Harrison]

I would recommend installing a HD in the A600. It makes the system a lot more useful. You can pickup second hand 2.5" HDs from ebay out of dead laptops cheaply, which is a great way to get hold of them these days.

[Toddney]

Thanks for the info. I have quickly looked around on ebay and amigakit.com, and found various cradles and hard drives. As my amiga600 will come with ROM 2.05, I am guessing that I shouldn't get a preinstalled 3.1 workbench hard drive? Or could I format this somehow in order to install 2.05?

Could I then store my games on the drive itself rather than use floppies? Is this what WHDLoad is all about, or is this something different. I heard this needs alot of ram also.

[Harrison]

You can connect the Harddrive to a PC and set it up using the Amiga emulator WinUAE as this can directly access Amiga formatted HDs. This makes life very easy as you can copy the files over from the PC to the HD, set it up just how you would like, and then disconnect the drive and use it in the Amiga. Makes life much easier.

If it is a 2.5" HD then you can get a cheap IDE to USB cable from ebay. Tiago and myself both purchased these from Hong Kong for £0.99p plus postage.

For the A600 I would recommend you install Workbench 2.1 to the HD as it was a big update compared to 2.05, and it will work perfectly on the A600. If you want a copy of this version of Workbench give me a PM and I can sort out the ADFs for you. Workbench 2.1 was a file structure closer to Workbench 3 and even has CrossDOS built in to read PC formatted floppies.

WHDLoad is indeed for installing all of your Floppy disk based Amiga games to Harddisk. If you wish to set the Amiga up for this I highly recommend a different method of setting up the harddrive.

You can download a very nice preconfigured Workbench setup called classicWB available at http://classicwb.abime.net/ with a special A600 ECS Workbench 2.1 version called Classic Workbench Green Amiga Alien Edition available at http://classicwb.abime.net/classicweb/gaae.htm

ClassicWB sets the HD up with a great pre-configured Workbench environment, and even sets WHDLoad up read for you to use.

You do need 2MB of ram to rn ClassicWB and WHDLoad properly, so if you don't have 2MB in your A600 I highly recommend you track down the Commodore A601 1MB chip ram expansion for the A600. Should be quite cheap on ebay these days, or maybe Amikit has one.

Once you have that sorted, you don't actually need to manually install the WHDLoad supported games to the HD either. There are extensive WHDLoad game packs created by a guy called Killa Gorilla which you can find at http://www.guildserver.co.uk/kgwhd/

If you have classicWB installed, then you can just download these WHDLoad game packs and copy them to the Amiga HD and run them. That simple enough?

[Toddney]

Information overload, but I think I am starting to understand

I am a little confused about the hard drives though and what is compatible. You say IDE to USB, is that for connecting an external USB drive? Could I buy any IDE hard disk if I wanted?

Then with these WHDLoad games, some of them will work with kickstart 2.05, but won't some also be only for kickstart 1.3? I got a degrader floppy with my amiga 600, so would I still be able to use this even if I have this HD setup you recommend?

Finally, the RAM upgrade, the only one I can find is this one: A602 but I am not sure this is a) correct and b) where is this installed (looks too big to fit).

TIA