Personal Project: Amiga Data Retrieval and Translation

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This is less a project for the forum and more documentation of methods that I am attempting here. I will be adding edited in sections with each development I take onto this whole thing. Don’t really care if you have a comment, but if you have information to share I would prefer that over “Oh wow cool! Bleh!”. Anything like that please throw to THIS thread and point a reference to a post in this one or to this thread in general. I’m trying to organize a lot of trains of thought here and having all my tests laid out will probably help someone in the future with a similar inquiry.

Thank you.

In my recent post referenced in the section above, I got an Amiga A2000. Part of the deal of owning it has been to retrieve the text files off the disks and put them in a conceivable format for the previous owner to view them in. These files were written in Textcraft '88 originally, but can be opened in '93 and possibly later. Textcraft is still maintained today and is shipped with Arohttp://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a2091
At the current stage I am in I have learned about the old Amiga disk formats, those being IFF and FFS. IFF was used on the Floppy drives and can only be read over a serial bus with how the bits are mapped out on the disks and how the drives interpret them. Theres no other way to tackle it, thats how IFF works in its base. FFS is the Hard Drive FS that is used in AmiWorkbench 2.2 and up. Prior to that the drives would be IFF. IFF can only go up to 60MB of addressable space. There is no way to format a floppy disk as FFS because the minimum space requirement is 40MB, yes that appears to be a thing though I have no way to test that as I have 1.23 kickstart and AmiW 1.2 versions 33.41, .44, .56. and .67.

There are a few ways for me to handle getting the data onto another machine, optimally a modern amiga operating system. Them, listed in no particular order, are:

1: Floppy in DF0: and Gotek in DF1: Using marauder 2 or XCOPY to forcefully copy files and disks onto the gotek USB to move to an Aros machine
2: Using a parallel to parallel cable and opening the amiga files in a windows app called Amiga Explorer which accesses the current amiga over the parallel port and can transfer data
3: Getting a 3.1 Kickstart and running a newer version of Workbench (3.1) and forcefully copying onto a Dos Compatible disk and going from there

Theres also some other methods involving purely an AROS based machine. Really only 2.

1: Using an On-Board floppy drive in a laptop to pull the files off of the disks in a 16 bit serial mode in possibly DOS of some sort
2: Using a Parallel cable mounted Floppy drive to mount the floppy and writing my own IFF driver (shouldn’t take too long, IFF was written in C)

Theres also other methods that I have theorized. Them Being:

1: The amiga disk file systems and the atari ST file systems were very similar. Because of this, in certain cases, with some mods to some code, IFF can be read, sort of, in an Atari ST disk burner. I forget the name of the App, but Dan Woods mentions it in his YT video about his short look at a ST 520ST^e. Its an open source app but its on XP and back. And I’m unsure the codebase is accessible.

What I know doesn’t work:

1: USB bus devices of any kind reading an IFF floppy. Cannot be done, at all.
2: Translating a DOS disk native in the amiga. That was implemented in its first stages in Workbench 2.0. I would need to upgrade my kickstart and I plan on going straight to 3.1.
3: Networking Via Parallel to a dos machine and having the drives mount that way. Thats what AFE is supposed to do but it has to be an NT environment above 4.1.

What I have no basis of evidence but have no research saying it isn’t possible:

1: Using a Vampire to run a newer Workbench and pull data off that way into the contained SD card
2: Old old networking hardware that existed for the A500 that is therefore A2000 compatible that would allow me an FTP transfer in native 1.2 AW

What I have to research more into:

CrossDOS.

CrossDOS seems to be the implementation of DOS commands and compatibility in Workbench 2.0. Right off the bat using that I could use XCOPY or Marauder 2 to move the files to a FAT16 or 32 disk and open it on a USB floppy drive.

What hardware I am getting to work on this?
Gotek: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Gotek-ADF-Floppy-Drive-Emulator-8GB-USB-Stick-for-Amiga-500-600-1200-4000-/301976968423 Its a USB based Amiga floppy disk emulator. I trust the ones on Amigakit I just don’t have 60 bucks.
(eventually) 3.1 Kickstart: http://amigaonthelake.com/kickstart-rom-for-amiga-a500-a500-plus-a600-a2000/ Then I can boot off the 3.1 floppies I can get off the net right off the Gotek later on if the theories above fail.
(Possibly) Hard Drive Kit: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a2091 I have to find a modern card for IDE or SATA because I have no 4 GB SCSI drives available. If nothing else, I can mount one of those drives in a AROS machine and jailbreak from there.

What have I done so far?

  • Researched about the drives
  • Tested basic copying abilities
  • Setup an Icaros Desktop machine
  • Tested other hardware compatibility

Everything I haven’t done could be anything you ask that is not on the list above.

If you have any ideas for something I could do feel free to comment or PM, otherwise I would be happy for you to refrain from random troll comments. Thank you.

Future edits here:

Edit: Partial broken idea 1: LD to DD drive converter.

My mother has some HP abomination machine that is a low density to high density disk converter. Its basically an automated CP\M computer with 2 drives. You put the disks in and tell it to go low to high or high to low and turn it on and it does it. I’m slightly curious of what blowing a low density disk up will do. It is file system agnostic and does direct write transfers. It doesn’t really care what the disk is or what is written on it.

Edit: Need to look into Amibridge and DOSBridge in AROS as potential paths for developing an IFF driver and what libs are going to be used or written.

Edit: I have been learning about alternative OS’s that can be run on an amiga 2000 and surprisingly Debian of all things is available.

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=42089&forum=27&11

^ That is the thread I made on the subject. So why am I shoehorning this in? Possible disk compatibility. Also future project?

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You are probably aware of this already, but I’ll post it here as another method for getting files off an Amiga…

I remember using (about 20 years ago) a null modem cable to transfer files off my A1200 to my new PC. I believe I just used some terminal software.

Amiga Forever provide guides and software for this purpose;

https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-105

https://www.amigaforever.com/ae/

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Yes you can use ae with a parallel cable as well. Twas mentioned.

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Ah yes, missed that bit. You don’t specifically need software to mount the disks on the remote machine though - you just need to know how to send/recieve etc.

A quick google turns up this guide;

http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/vc/amiga_transfer.html

With regards to floppy disks I recall you could format HD as DD and vice-versa (drilling a hole on the DD disk) but data corruption was almost guaranteed on a DD formated as HD. I did for a while have a PC HD floppy drive, but it could not be used to read/write Amiga formatted disks just MS-DOS.

Happy days, good luck.

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Thank you. I have a lot to learn here.

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Doing a full post to this as the project is nearly complete and all I really need is confirmation that my experiments will work.

In the time since I have gotten the gotek and set it up and gotten games and stuff working. The next few paragraphs are off of an amiga forum I am a user of and I’m too lazy to rewrite so anything pertaining to “confirm this for me” is directed at them, though if you have an answer as well please do tell.

Ok so I have gotten to the stage where I can now attack this head on. But, not how I had expected. I had thought I would be able to use the Gotek and have just empty directories programmed as empty disks because I have seen AtariST ones do that (Non HxC). But that didn’t pan out at all, nor is that how THIS gotek drive works. However, I did find a compilation of Workbench roms with relative kickstart packaged in with them so even though I have Kick 1.2 I can run WB1.3 and possibly higher, though I only tried 1.1, 1.2 (which was set up for an A500 but still booted?), and 1.3.

My plan, now, is to boot to 1.3 or 2.0 and use the DOS disk functions listed above (by now 4 people I believe) and do all that save mumbojumbo and HOPEFULLY be able to save to a DOS disk and pull all the text off the disks which, to me, seems VASTLY less complicated than my previous plans and ideas.

I’m only nervous about one thing. That being that I have to have the gotek as DF0 to do all this magic. I plan on playing games later on and I’m unsure of how many games actually have a workbench packaged in (I am not an aged amiga user, mostly an AROS enthusiast [as far as basic use and dev tracking]), which seems normal for the time? Tell me that my assumption is correct? I’m very much unsure.

In any case, I have very few things left to do to this machine. Need an 030 or 040 accelerator, 3.1 kick, and something for a hard drive system. If nothing else, getting this thing up to 3.1 and ripping it all up will eventually give me access to all sorts of tools that I don’t have access to at the moment to pull the data off, but maybe that won’t need to happen! (which is preferable as I am out of funds to spend on this).

Will keep you all posted as needed or requested. This is a LOT easier than DOS machines D:
God forbid DEC Alpha’s that I have tooled with.

Link to the post on the Amiga Forum: http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=42080&forum=27&start=20&viewmode=flat&order=0

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Those folks on that forum are very helpful. I liked that Scuzz even made a blog post for you, shame you don’t have a more recent Amiga sat there spare. I think most of those guys are collectors and probably have several!

I think you are on the right track, but just hampered by being on Kickstart 1.2. If I read your post correctly you are saying that you can soft-install a more recent kickstart and then boot from that? Do you have images for Kickstart v2 or higher?

As for Amiga floppy disk based games very few booted AmigaDOS let alone into the stripped down workbench. Those that did were usually the bigger multi-disk games that really needed to be installed onto a HHD e.g. Monkey Isalnd 2 (12 disks IIRC). From what I remember most of the single disk floppies could not be read from Workbench and had various copy protection mechanisms. Games that were on disks that could be read in workbench were often the easiest to crack or cheat on. I remember figuring out how to use hex editor to defeat an annoying password based protection system so the answer was always ‘the’ and again to give myself lots of lives. That Amiga consumed a lot of my early teenage life :slight_smile:

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Yeah I highly appreciate that from scuzz. I’m plotting with that. Possibly an amithlon machine of some sort or… Maye morph, I’m not sure yet. I also have amiga explorer available to me.