Amiga 1200 PCMCIA Compact Flash Guide
Amiga 1200 PCMCIA Compact Flash Guide
The internet is full of .ADF (Amiga Disk File) files but how to put these onto an Amiga floppy? PC floppy drives cannot write the .ADF files. It turns out there is a way. The tool to use is an Amiga command-line tool called adf2disk. But how do we transfer the tool and the .ADF files onto the Amiga in the first place?
The Amiga 1200 has a PCMCIA card slot which can be used with a PCMCIA to CF (Compact Flash) adaptor. After looking around on the internet I found and ordered this set of adaptor andcard. I went for the 4GB card because 4GB is the maximum disk size an Amiga can access using the default file system FFS.
The Amiga does not recognize the CF card by default, some files will have to be installed onto the workbench disk before it can be accessed. We can download these files, put them on a DOS floppy and copy them to the Workbench floppy disk. Before we use a DOS floppy we need to activate CrossDOS.
This took me some time to figure out, but this is the complete procedure to follow:
- Enable CrossDOS on the Amiga;
- On a PC, format a floppy with the FAT file system, in 720KB mode;
- Download the files needed to recognize the CF card, and put these on the floppy;
- Install the files from the floppy onto the workbench floppy using CrossDOS;
- reboot, access the CF card and test;
- Download .ADF files and the adf2disk utility and put these on the CF card;
- Write .ADF file to Amiga floppy;
- Enjoy.
Then, download and unpack the following archives:
- Insert the card into the Amiga;
- Open a CLI and go to the CF card by typing cd cf0:
- Put an empty floppy into DF0:
- Use the command-line tool to write images: adf2disk <filename>.adf