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macOS and Gotek aka life without AmigaExplorer

Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 1:48 pm
by meunierd
Not owning a Windows machine means that I don't have AmigaExplorer for loading files to my A2000, but I do have a Gotek! After a bit of fiddling I've finally landed on a decent workflow for getting just about anything onto my Amiga with a little bit of patience.

None of my googling turned up any results for anyone trying to do this so I figured it was worth writing down.

You will need: For anyone that's comfortable with macOS Homebrew you can use my tap for a packaged version of amitools by running:

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brew tap meunierd/homebrew
brew update
brew install amitools
This will give you the all important xdftool which will allow us to craft AmigaDOS friendly ADFs!

Let's assume we have an archive file that we want to get onto our Amiga called archive.lha. We can run:

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xdftool archive.adf create
xdftool archive.adf format archive
xdftool archive.adf write archive.lha
Just copy the resulting archive.adf to your gotek and you're done!

But what if your lha is larger than a single floppy? Luckily macOS and AmigaDOS can work together thanks to macOS' split tool and AmigaDOS' join tool.

On your Mac, you can run:

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split -b 800k archive.lha archive
which will break up archive.lha into floppy-friendly 800kb chunks called archiveaa, archiveab, archiveac and so on. Now using xdftool you can create one floppy per chunk.

From an Amiga shell, you let's assume we have a Work:Temp directory. We'll `copy` every chunk from every floppy to Work:Temp and then:

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cd Work:Temp
join archive#? AS archive.lha
Putting it all together, I came up with this fish shell function:

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function adfzip --argument name archive
	split -b 800kb "$archive" "$name"

	for part in "$name"a*
		xdftool "$part".adf create
		xdftool "$part".adf format "$part"
		xdftool "$part".adf write "$part"
		rm $part
	end
end
And you're done! This should apply just as well to Linux users too. I hope someone finds this helpful!

Re: macOS and Gotek aka life without AmigaExplorer

Posted: Fri Feb 28, 2020 12:54 am
by Bulletdust
I actually found out by mistake that Linux actually supports FFS, the discovery made my month.