by Peter Bortas

Some people don't have the fortune of having their Amiga hooked to the net like me, so I wrote this text to help them getting the vast amount of Amiga programs from the net, wherever they have access to it.. At school, at work or at more blessed (non Amiga-) friends.

Unfortunately Mac,PC or most UNIX disk drives are incapable of reading or writing Amiga disks due to the nonexsistant sector gap, but you can do it the other way around. Format the disks in 720k PC format (Mac's can do this by installing AFE,) put the files on the disks, split them if nessesary and then read them into the Amiga. If you don't have DOS>=2.1 then you can't do this automaticly, you'll have to get some program to do it. There is CrossDOS which is a comersial product, and some smaller PD-programs that can be found on Aminet.

So basicly:

  1. Get the programs from internet to your PC, Mac, UN*X or whatever.
  2. Format some disks in 720k** PC format.
  3. Split* the files in 720k chunks.
  4. Copy the files to the disks.
  5. Run over to your beloved Amiga and put the disks in.
  6. Start whatever program you use to read PC disks from your Amiga.
    1. Copy the files to HD and join then if you have splitted them.
    2. You have no HD?! You are in trouble, most join programs needs the size of the original chunks free on disk to create the final joint file, an extradrive might help a lot here.
    3. You have no Extradrive either?!! You might be able to fix this with a RAM-disk. I'll look in to it.
  7. Unpack the files.



* Files are often to big for 720k PC disks (the standard example being 880k DMSfiles,) so you'll have to use a program like Split, Splitz or dd to split the files in chunks that fit on the disks.

** Whenever I say "720k" and "880k" this is to be replaced by "1.44M" and "1.76M" respectively if you have a High Density(1.76M) drive in your Amiga.