A1200 starter pack

[iljitsch]

Ok, this is not 100% hardware but it does have an important hardware component.

I listened to a podcast where someone who didn't (seem to) have much Amiga experience was talking about getting an Amiga 1200 in working order.

Which made me think: what would be a good "starter pack" to get a bare A1200 working in a meaningful way? For that, I think you need two things: a harddrive and a way to exchange files with the modern computing world.

Both can be accomplished with CF cards. So the starter pack would contain:

• an IDE-to-CF adapter to be able to use a CF card as an internal harddrive
• a CF-to-PCMCIA adapter to read (and write) one or more CF cards with data that was downloaded from the internet using a modern computer with its own CF card interface
• two CF cards

But... CF cards used by modern systems use the FAT file system. The drivers for that are not included in AmigaOS. So we first need to get those drivers on the A1200. Some solutions:

1. the CF card intended as the harddrive has Workbench and the right drivers (CFD133 and fat95) installed
2. the starter pack comes with a barebones Workbench floppy that can mount FAT formatted PCMCIA cards

I actually do have a disk that can do 2.

So what I'm thinking is to talk to some of our favorite Amiga shops and suggest this starter pack (either with option 1 and/or 2) as a product.

Or am I barking up an already solved tree? From what I've seen many people get over the initial "getting stuff on the Amiga" hump by creating a bootable internal CF card using WinUAE. But that always sounded quite complex to me.

Or perhaps the number of new A1200s that require setup is so low that it's not even worth the effort?

[McTrinsic]

Actually, I do like the idea.
You could provide a CF card that comes performatted in both MBR and RDB. It’s a bit tricky but possible.

You could then supply the FAT95 driver with the CF card in the RDB-side. And a mountlist to access the FAT part.

If you always supply 4GB cards they can be imaged and sold by putting the image on it.

Hope you understood that.

[intric8]

I personally like the idea a lot, but when you say "comes with a barebones Workbench floppy" that's where things probably get a tad silly due to the IP ownership of said Workbench, etc.

[iljitsch]

Actually, I do like the idea.
You could provide a CF card that comes performatted in both MBR and RDB. It’s a bit tricky but possible.

Probably a lot tricky.

But... is dual file system on the same CF card necessary?

The big hurdle is to get the drivers that let you access FAT-formatted CF cards on an A1200 that doesn't have any other means to communicate with the modern computing world.

So for this we could just use an FFS-formatted CF card. If we can get the A1200 to mount that CF card, then it's possible to copy the drivers off of that card.

After that, you could simply reformat the card as FAT in order to exchange additional files with a modern computer.

Since this only requires the FastFileSystem and the carddisk.device that come with the system and the right mountlist, this can be accomplished by simply typing in the required mountlist.

Of course all of this does require that the A1200 has a working Workbench and a text editor.

And we need to be able to get an FFS image on a CF card using a PC, Linux machine or Mac. I guess the dd tool will do that. (If anyone has tips on this, please let me know.)

If you always supply 4GB cards they can be imaged and sold by putting the image on it.

Hope you understood that.

I think you can put the image for a smaller card on a larger card, so size shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Now this doesn't solve the issue where an A1200 has nothing to boot from. In that case my bootable floppy would still be easiest. Back in the day lots of software was distributed this way and thus had some files from Commodore on those floppies... I wonder if there was just some blanket permission for this. Hyperion doesn't have any info on this that I could find.

Personally I would just distribute the floppies / images and wait for any copyright claims to arrive, but I guess a store that sells Amiga stuff would like some assurances.

[McTrinsic]

From what you wrote in the original post, I thought you would also be thinking about an IDE2CF adapter.

In that case, the mixed MBR(FAT)/RDB setup makes sense.

Assuming you have a 3.1 floppy disk still lying around or even are able to sell copies of 3.1, you could then access an automount- RDB partition. From that you could get more software to access all the software you put on the FAT part.

You can even later on make the CF bootable.

If you make the CF adapter a dual one, like e.g. the TrueIDE, you can then work on / prepare a second CF that will later be your routinely used CF.

[iljitsch]

The idea was to sell two CF cards with the appropriate adapters: one to act as an internal HDD (with the IDE-CF adapter) and another to make it possible to exchange files with modern computers (with the PCMCIA-CF adapter).

The first one would have to be fully Amiga-formatted and a FAT partition wouldn't be useful.

For the second one, the original idea was to make this a FAT-only card, no Amiga-specific file system required.

However, the hardware part is simple. You can buy the CF cards and both types of adapters pretty much anywhere.

The tricky part is the bootstrapping: how do you get new data on the Amiga? The original, and not completely abandoned, idea is to have a floppy with the right drivers.

But the new idea is that if you have an Amiga 1200/600 that already has a working HDD, either being a real HDD, or a CF card and then the OS installed through the original floppies or some other means, then all you need is to get the drivers on that HDD and you can start exchanging files with a modern computer by swapping CF cards in and out of the PCMCIA slot.

And one way to get those drivers on the A1200/A600 would be for a CF card with an FFS partition and then in order to mount that partition, the Amiga user would have to type in a mount list. So no floppies, serial port, or internal bootable RDB CF card required.

(I came to the conclusion a dual file system FAT / FFS CF card could make sense because that way a Mac or Windows computer could write a disk image they understand to the CF card. However, so far writing images or even formatting a CF card on my Mac has turned out impossible...)

I currently have two IDE-CF adapters: my original one does indeed support two CF cards which is great to migrate from a smaller to a bigger card. The new one sits nicely above the PCMCIA slot so it's out of the way of my Indivision AGA MK3.

AFAIK, Amigas can't boot from the PCMCIA slot.

[McTrinsic]

What it comes down to is the chicken and egg issue.

Assuming you do have a working floppy that you can boot from, you need an FAT driver (FAT95) to access any PC-formatted CF. Or even NTFS.
Both are available from
aminet but I don’t know if they may be distributed on such a CF.

I could imagine it the other way round. Distribute a pre-made WinUAE - image including configuration with some scripts on it. The script would do everything necessary to set up the CF as boot drive and copy over the drivers from Aminet. The user may have to provide some files on his own. Put this CF internally and then have fun with the second CF card because you have all files available.

Yes, it is tedious. Always, because Windows can’t access RDB drives and Amigos can’t access FAT/MBR drives out of the box.

[iljitsch]

What it comes down to is the chicken and egg issue.

Assuming you do have a working floppy that you can boot from, you need an FAT driver (FAT95) to access any PC-formatted CF. Or even NTFS.
Both are available from
aminet but I don’t know if they may be distributed on such a CF.

I looked at fat95.lha, cfd133.lha and lha.run (the three things you'd need) and none of them mention any copyright status that I was able to find within a minute or two.

I think the fact that they were uploaded to Aminet two or three decades ago (initially) can be taken as a reasonable indication that other types of distribution as part of a mechanism to make Amigas more functional can be assumed to be allowed.

Distribute a pre-made WinUAE - image including configuration with some scripts on it. The script would do everything necessary to set up the CF as boot drive and copy over the drivers from Aminet.

We could make the exact same script that runs natively on a Mac, PC or Linux machine. Or maybe not have everyone run the script themselves and just provide a fully functional disk image...

I think it's not entirely unreasonable to have questions about redistributing disks or disk images with files copyrighted by Commdore back in the day, but stuff that has had a long history on Aminet and doesn't include any copyright prohibitions... that seems excessive.

One interesting workaround would be to only distribute the CF card image through Aminet. So if you can distribute lha, fat95 and cfd133 through Aminet, then it would be hard to argue that you couldn't do that exact same thing in a slightly different form.

[McTrinsic]

It probably is possible. You might as well consider AROS for an initial deployment.

Just because something is available on Aminet doesn’t mean it can be distributed. Some programs have an exclusive distribution right granted for Aminet.

You still need to get the OS on the CF, which is copyrighted in any case.

[iljitsch]

Well, if it's been on Aminet forever and doesn't contain any copyright info, I think it's not unreasonable to operate under the assumption that small scale distribution through other means is permissible until proven otherwise.

The OS doesn't need to be on the CF card in this scenario, as you need the OS to access the card in the first place...

Some parts of the OS are needed to make a bootable floppy in the situation where the Amiga doesn't have a harddrive it can boot from. Then of course you'd want to (re-) format and existing or new harddrive and then install the OS, for which apparently the install floppies are missing. But this can be remedied by buying the 3.1.4 / 3.2 AmigaOS from Hyperion or the collection of older versions of the OS from another rights holder of which the name currently (genuinely) escapes me. Put the ADFs on the CF card that goes in the PCMCIA slot, boot from the CardBootDisk, mount the install disk images, install the OS on the CF card hooked up to the IDE interface internally. Nothing to it really.

I do have the CardBootDisk floppy in working order. What I need to do is see if I can read/write CF card disk images to test that part. I did confirm that you can mount an FFS formatted CF card on a stock system by just adding the appropriate mountlist.