"Amiga Setup Part 1"

Posted: 29 November, 2020

Back on the A600 today.

I opted for an SD Card adaptor for the HD, rather than Compact Flash, because I didn't want anything rattling around in the case. It's a nice bit of kit.

There're a few options for getting WB 3.1.4, I went straight to Hyperion. Be warned: if you buy a pre-installed CF there are two versions, so check which one you have ordered. Most default to an A1200 friendly one, which will be using a disk format that's not compatible with the A600.

I downloaded the ADF files from Hyperion and primed a stick for my Gotek. I've not had the Gotek for very long -- up to now I've been using an HxC emulator, but I want to put that in one of my 8bits -- but it's fast and super stable. I've sacrificed an old Cumana drive to use as a housing:

I know some of you might think that's sacrilege, but honestly, my luck with floppies has been atrocious over the last few years. I'm absolutely done with them.

The Gotek booted fine, and I was able to setup the SD card using HDTools. The adaptor was recognised immediately, but I had to set the card type manually. Going to "Change Drive Type" and letting it re-scan was enough.

One gotcha that also caught me, when partitioning and formatting, was that the default block size was too small for the A600. It was unable to verify the partition -- it does it in memory, for some reason -- so I set mine to 4096, which was enough to verify several partitions, all over 4gig in size.

Workbench installed itself without issue.

A bare workbench is no use to anyone, and I need a way to copy a lot of files over.

After experimenting, I found that it's possible to use ADFOpus, on Windows, to create empty ADF files and then use these as a way to copy stuff via the Gotek. That's going to be perfect for my dev stuff, but I've been scouring Aminet for useful stuff over several days, and there's a lot to get over...

I have a lot of old CF cards lying around (from when I used DSLRs) and a PCMCIA adaptor, but I'd clean forgotten what was required to set this up on an Amiga. After a bit of digging, it was just a case of pulling down CFD and Fat95 from Aminet, and putting them in the correct place. CFD provides the mountlist and script (with icon), so the CF can either be auto mounted, or done manually.

Today's first surprise was how long it takes to copy 60mb from a CF to an SD card, on an unexpanded Amiga. I have seriously taken RAM and CPU for granted on my A1200! I've run out of memory quite a few times today, and I am now very familiar with Workbench's progress bar, but, I think I'm over the hump.

Next step is to unpack all this stuff, get installing, and configuring.

And look for a nice Cli-based menu, so I don't have to load Workbench unless I need to. :D

Previous Post: "Accidental Amiga"