Setting up a CF-Card Read For Amiga500 via UAE

[Sinphaltimus]

So I'm following along here and my concern is that the Win UAE system settings are for a powerful aga A600/1200. Would that matter in the end if the CF card is going into an ECS A500?

 

https://16bitdust.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/partitioning-16-gb-compact-flash-card-with-winuae-and-pfs3/

 

[amiman99]

I think you should be fine.

 

A600 is the same as ECS A500+.

[Sinphaltimus]

Thanks, I'm going to give it a go, the Vampire board isn't here yet but I suspect it will be within a month or so. My goal is to plug it in and boot it up as soon as it does. The test some programs and finally transplant it all into a tower case. It'd be nice to have the OS and programs all setup and running as intended before hand.

[amiman99]

I would like to get the Vampire too, I'm torn between the A500 and A600 version. I like the A600 better, but my A600 had some caps leaking (that I replaced) and damaged some traces around the caps. The computer works fine now.

The A500 is more bulky and no PCMCIA slot for easy file transfer.

[Sinphaltimus]

My ultimate plan is to put my A500 in to a tower case. I'll use a ribbon cable to mount the CF card reader so i can easily access it. I also plan to get some sort of TCPIP stack going either via serial or if I can grab a plipbox off ebay. One just ran without a buyer. i contacted the seller to see if he'd consider reducing the price a little and I'd buy it right away. We'll see how that goes.

 

On another note, I had success setting up workbench on my existing CF card. So bonus there. Next up I have to follow some tutorials on setting up WHDLoad so i can run my floppies off HDD. I hope to get that going this weekend as i think it's going to be time consuming.

I should mention I had a lot of trouble "cleaning" the partitions off the CF card and still being able to use it for WinUAE, end result was windows 10 being a bit more restrictive than I like with low level access. I ended up having to setup the CF on a Windows 7 box.

[eightbit]

I did this (a few times) for the A500 and the A2000. I set up classic WB advanced for the A500 (as I have an accelerator and ACA500+ on that one) and used Classic WB green alien edition on my A2000 which is not accelerated. Worked out great. Its a little tricky at times, but I found after creating the workbench (classic WB makes it easy as all of the useful apps including WHDLoad are already installed) I found the easiest method of transferring WHDLoad games to a partition was to use WinUAE and:

 

1. Mount the directory of WHDLoad games (unzipped/unLHA'ed) as a hard disk

2. Mount the CF card as another HD

3. Boot with a bootable disk copy of DOpus

4. Use DOpus and copy the games from the WHDLoad "hard drive" to the CF partition of choice

[Sinphaltimus]

Awesome. Thanks for that tip. I haven't even begin to download anything whdload related. Just kind of lurking the project forums about it in aeb.abime.net until I decide to dig in and go for it.

Edited May 17, 2017 by Sinphaltimus

[eightbit]

If you need a hand let me know. The biggest PIA is setting up the partitions and file system. You can use FFS (the stock built in file system) if your partitions are not going to exceed around 3GB each though. PFS3 will allow larger partitions but is a bit trickier to set up.

[eightbit]

To be correct actually with FFS (if you decide to use it) do not make the partitions larger than 2.7GB or you will have problems. Trust me on that one

 

And, I did this all on Win10 just fine. You just need to make sure you run cmd elevated. I'm sure you know what you are doing, but just to put this out there for others:

 

1. Run CMD as admin (right click and run as admin)

2. Type diskpart

3. Type list disk

4. Type select disk # (where # is the CF card)

5. Type clean

6. Close the window

 

Then you will have a CF card with no partition structure that is ready to use/work with in WinUAE. Same applies to other cards, USB drives, etc.

Edited May 18, 2017 by eightbit