Amiga to PC data transfer

Anyone had experience of transfering data from the serial port on the back of the Amiga 1200 to a RS232 port via a null modem cable and Twin Express software?

Alternatively, is anyone aware of software that will run on a PC that will allow remote access to the files on the Amiga. I've found the Amiga Forever product, was hoping for something more readily accessible.

Regards, Blitzplotter.

A long time back I managed to link up an A1200 to PC via the parallel ports using a null modem cable I knocked up
I wired the cable up something like shown here

I cannot recall what software comms setup I had to do at the time. Something like configuring LPT1: to read the PC cards parallel port connector(?)

I probably went down this route

You can install cross dos on the amiga and then copy to pc formatted double density disks. I did this to get my stuff from the disks for my old A500.

While it costs £40, my brother got one of these and it really is a huge improvement over any other transfer method you could set up, assuming you have a wireless PC connection. (There's an ethernet version too.) Gets the Amiga online too.

I have had limited success tonight, managed to format a PC disk to 720Kbytes on the Amiga by sticking PC0 into the Devs/Drivers I think. Would my laptop recognise it - no!. I'd a null modem lead going from my laptop to the Serial port on the Amiga, would Amiga Forever send over the lead, no a non descript problem with the com port.

@Jim, thanks for the link, however a lot of the embedded links are broken.

I'm loathe to spend £38 on my somewhat creaky Amiga but it might be my only option. Thanks for the suggestion.

What about formatting them as 720 on the PC and try them that way round? I seem to remember Crossdos being problematic with formatting.

I've succesfully used it in the past to exchange files between Amiga and PC, but it has been forever ago. Can't give you any pointers, other than saying that it did indeed work as advertised.

yeah you cant format PC disks on the amiga it dont work properly, you have to do em on PC first, also HD-3.5" Disks dont format that well to 720k. Your best bet is to get the high density drive for the Amiga so you can use the 1.44Mb disks (blimey they are still being used today?)

There are some telnet clients that can send via the serial ports too, I would look out for these as it might make your life easier. PC's these days are waay to fast for transfering sometimes you may encounter buffering problems.

Personally I would go the 3.5" disk route, you can format HD's as 720 if you put tape over the hole on the disk (not the copy protect bit the other one) they will be recognised as 720k then :)

I've never had any problems, although you probably need the /F parameter for format to specify the 720KB size, and/or cover the second hole in the floppy with some tape so the drive won't automatically recognize it as a HD disk and try to second guess you.

I did the 720KB disk thing (formatted on PC and used MessyDOS or whatever it was called) and it worked fine. This was about 10 years ago.

That wireless card look Rad though :-) Suitable for an A1200? hope so.

Taping up the 'other' hole sounds like a good tip... Gotta go and try it, nope still recognises as only 1.44MBytes

Tried the:

FORMAT A: /F:7.2
FORMAT A: /F:0.72
FORMAT A: /F:720000
FORMAT A: /V:a /Q /F:720000

No dice.... with a disk with the other hole covered up....

Was there ever an application written in Blitz Basic 2.1 that would attempt serial comms ???

Yes, that's what it's for, and it works really well. (The guy who runs the online store is really helpful if you have problems too.)

I've never had any joy in the past with serial transfer between PC and Amiga, and the floppy disk thing is so unreliable it's not funny.

Looks like I might be opting for the wireless option, never had my Amiga online....

Right, ordered one... just after I oredered it I noticed this:-

https://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=440

Seems like that would've also done the job. But then my crumbly 1200 would have never made it onto the net... so it'll be worth it just for that.

So, this weekend, my Amiga BBasic app may well be running on an xbox!

on the pc, use:

Format a: t:80 n:9

to format to 720k it should then wrk with crossdos. You dont need to tape any holes to do this.

@Blitzplotter: hey let me know how it goes with the wireless!

btw, seeing all these funny command line params for format makes me think that I probably just formatted the disks on my Amiga with MessyDos (or maybe I used CrossDos). Wonder if I used an Amiga disk and formatted it or if you have to format a PC disk. If it was a PC disk it would have been a standard 1.44HD disk as I worked in a computer shop at the time (LONG time ago). Hmm I'm not sure that ramble helped at all.

I remember my Amiga online - good times on IRC.

Transferring between Amiga and PC can be done via parallel link-up, but you try finding a PC with a parallel port, these days.

Best way of getting data from an Amiga to a PC without spending a lot is hook up via serial at 57600DTE 8n1. NComm on the Amiga and HyperTerm on the PC. ZModem transfer. Job done.

Hooking up a 115200DTE is destined to failure on all but the most resilient A1200's. Mine managed it (after an OS3.1 kickstart upgrade and armed with a 50MHz 68030 + 16MB), but I understand my experience was a rarity.

Is NComm part of the Amiga OS?

they sell new/reconditioned A1200's ...
pitty the pcmcia device doesnt use SD nigh on everything i own uses SD

and without a case of some kind im a bit leery of the mini mig

but games seemed to be more fun when the systems were limited in some way

yeah, i think I'm gonna have to disconect my external CD drive from my miggy 1200 to allow the wireless network card to be connected. External drive has failed to work for a while anyways....

next, I'll need a keyboard for my XBox....

I don't remember the name anymore but I used to transfer back and forth between my Amiga and a PC with a program that mounted the HD inside the Amiga as a PC harddisk via a nullmodem cable......

NComm is not part of the OS, but it's a freebie on Aminet now.

It's a small app, so will fit on a 720KB formatted floppy, which you can mount easily with OS3.1.

Well, I'm moving slowly forward with my wireless card connected to the Amiga. Amiga boots form hard drive, recognises Wireless card as green light comes on wireless card, then attempts to boot from HDDRive and red guru alert. cycle repeats.

Tried booting from WBench disk, no green light on wireless card.

Only was yo successfully boot from HDrive is to remove wireless card.

Changed the jumpers on my Amiga 1200 to reduce the amount of memory below 4MBytes, greater than this results in a conflict with the PCMCIA port. Next, hopefully just a bit of configuration to rectify, then I will have my Amiga1200 wirelessly networked.

I am little curious why you are going to all this trouble, there are some very nice 100% Amiga emulators that allow you to get data from a PC into them very easily, why do you need an actual Amiga?

Darkheart

My actual Amiga has some software I wrote in BlitzBasic 2.1 which accurately plots the speed you were travelling at... there is still a healthy Amiga community - WINUAE has helped in this regard.

The hardware I built worked via the joystick port, WINUAE is so good it accepts USB joystick input from a PC. A labour of love, a bit geeky, but hey my software utility might see the light of day via WINUAE. And you never know, one or two bods might be interested in building their own bike speed measuring hardware stuff.

I confess I've been close to giving in and opting for the simpler option,, but Matt at AmigaKit is very helpful - so I am going to exhaust all options before giving in.

I clocked a product at AmigaKit.co.uk that may well have been simpler than networking my Amiga/PC which goes for about £24 including a 1GByte micro SD card which allows tranfer via the PCMCIA port. If i'd spotted that I would have bought that one instead of the wireless network affair.

I can whole heartedly recommed www.amigakit.co.uk product for transferring files to the PC. I have a (gargantuan) 340MByte Hard drive on my amiga. The flash drive you get with the EASYADF transfer PCMCIA transfer drive is 1 GByte in size.

I have transferred my BlitzBasic 2.1 Cycling velocity measuring software to my PC. I had the sense to make the graphs resizeable back in the day. It almost looks sexy on my PC running a High Spec AMiga via WINUAE. My wife said she could not recall it looking so good in the past, well it wasn't running within WINUAE on a 21 inch LCD monitor.

To put it in perpestive, they sent rockets to the moon with somehwhat rubbishy CPU's. Do not get me wrong they did the job well and all due credit to the engineers that built them. The AMIGA was very advanced for its day and not many could afford the high spec machines - and there certainly was not the relativly high spec monitors available back in the day. Now that there is polished emulators such as WINUAE it kind of still puts the gargantuan specs required these days to run OS s to shame.

I will be uploading my cycling velocity software to an AMiga download site in the near future. A strong testament to the foundations that BRL was built upon.