Wednesday, August 09, 2006

We love the Miggy

After my last post, I don't want to make this blog yet another boring IT Technician's blog, but I've just found a wonderful little program on the internet which I must tell you about which I think is extremely useful if like me you like to emulate the Commodore Amiga on your PC.

One of the biggest pains with Amiga emulation is that a standard PC floppy disk-drive wil not read Amiga disks. However, some wonderful chap has created a little program called ADFREAD that allows Amiga disks to be read by a PC disk drive and converted to an ADF image file for use with most Amiga emulators (namely WinUAE). By using a special floppy filter driver which can be downloaded here, "the driver exposes command-level access to the uPD765a floppy disk controller, making it possible to read/write many non-standard and copy-protected disk formats", as mentioned on the website. This means that by using two standard PC floppy disk drives, installed on the same cable, Amiga disks CAN be read without the need for any hardware modifications or attachments.

It has taken me ages to convert only half of my Amiga disks using CrossDos on my Amiga 1200, transfering them from my Amiga to PC - now I can do it all from the comfort of my desktop PC in half the time.

Of course, you can't beat playing on the real thing, but sometimes emulation is just more practical (besides, I don't think Michelle would appreciate another computer setup taking over the house).

All hail the Commodore Amiga 500 - King of the 16-bit era

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