Historically, most Amigas ended up supposed to boot from a floppy disk. . An Amiga can readily make its individual boot floppy, but only at the time it’s already booted up. If you really do not have a floppy ready to go, you’re out of luck, as PCs can not conveniently make them for Amigas. [Roc] whipped up the amigaXfer bootstrapping technique to address this pretty challenge.
Offered on Github, the amigaXfer tool is in a position to execute various jobs with an Amiga by means of its serial port. The Amiga should initial be turned on whilst plugged into one more laptop managing amigaXfer by way of serial connection. When the Workbench floppy prompt arrives up, the CrashEntry element on amigaXfer really should be activated, and the BERR and GND pins on the Amiga’s 68000 CPU really should be connected just for a break up 2nd, triggering the Amiga to go into a particular serial debug manner. This permits amigaXfer to choose control, letting a disk to be formatted and created with a debug bootblock, and this disk can then be used to boot the Amiga without having the need for the hack.
It’s a nifty way to get your Amiga up and jogging if you have just purchased it off eBay and it didn’t occur with any disks. From here, you can use amigaXfer to load other applications on to the Amiga by using the identical serial cable you made use of for the bootstrapping procedure, also. The hack is not minimal to just the Amiga 500, both. It ought to do the job on a vary of machines, which include AmigaOS versions 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x.
Unlike the Commodore 64, we probably will not see model new reproduction Amigas at any time soon, but we can aspiration. As normally, if you’ve acquired ’em, deliver your most popular Amiga tasks into the tipsline!