PC to Amiga link

This document covers a simple data cable and the software to transfer ADF images from a PC directly to an Amiga diskette.

Background

This project is a modified version of Greg Craske's PC-to-Amiga link project. The modifications made are marked in de source code by the tag: DISK WRITE. The modified version can write directly to an unformatted Amiga diskette, which may be necessary if no temporary space (like a hard drive) is present on the Amiga.

Support for unformatted diskettes is based on hd2f.c from Markus Wandel, see his Amiga Software page for more information.

For other PC to Amiga link software, see the A.S.T. Amiga PAGE.

Hardware configuration

See the original pages for more information on how to make the parallel cable.

Installation

Retrieve the source code with Git.

git clone https://github.com/jfjlaros/pcget2.git

Compile the Linux binary:

cd pcget2
gcc -O2 -o amigaput amigaput.c

To compile the Amiga binary, use DICE either on the Amiga itself, or in an emulator like UAE.

Usage

This version works exactly like the original one on the PC side. For the Amiga, the pcget binary has an additional command line option -w to write directly to a diskette.

pcget -w

pcget will ask to change diskette (running this program from diskette is recommended because it uses quite some memory otherwise). Then it will format the newly inserted diskette, filling it with data provided by amigaput 20 tracks at a time. Note that this will overwrite all data on the diskette.

If pcget does not work for some reason, the pcget_debug program can be used for diagnostic purposes. It writes 5 tracks at a time, reads them back and compares the tracks. If a mismatch is found, an error message is displayed.

Known bugs

• pcget reports the file size to be 0 when using the -w option.
• pcget writes everything to diskette when using the -w option. No checks on file size or headers are performed.