You Can Now Bootstrap Your Amiga Without A Floppy With This One Weird Trick

Customarily, most Amigas were being intended to boot from a floppy disk. . An Amiga can easily make its individual boot floppy, but only as soon as it is currently booted up. If you do not have a floppy prepared to go, you’re out of luck, as PCs just can’t commonly make them for Amigas. [Roc] whipped up the amigaXfer bootstrapping method to fix this very difficulty.

Obtainable on Github, the amigaXfer tool is in a position to complete various tasks with an Amiga by means of its serial port. The Amiga should to start with be turned on when plugged into one more laptop or computer functioning amigaXfer by way of serial relationship. When the Workbench floppy prompt arrives up, the CrashEntry element on amigaXfer should really be induced, and the BERR and GND pins on the Amiga’s 68000 CPU must be linked just for a split 2nd, triggering the Amiga to go into a particular serial debug method. This allows amigaXfer to choose control, allowing for a disk to be formatted and composed with a debug bootblock, and this disk can then be made use of to boot the Amiga without having the need for the hack.

It is a nifty way to get your Amiga up and running if you’ve just purchased it off eBay and it didn’t occur with any disks. From in this article, you can use amigaXfer to load other systems on to the Amiga by means of the same serial cable you employed for the bootstrapping procedure, way too. The hack isn’t minimal to just the Amiga 500, both. It ought to function on a array of devices, such as AmigaOS versions 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x.

Compared with the Commodore 64, we in all probability won’t see brand name new replica Amigas anytime shortly, but we can desire. As generally, if you’ve acquired ’em, mail your most popular Amiga jobs into the tipsline!