Monday, January 21, 2008

Amiga 3000 - patience is not my favorite virtue

The Amiga is my last machine to get up and running, and it's definitely testing my patience.  Unlike most computers I own, there are not too many ways to get a completely raw Amiga up and running without having actual Amiga-formatted floppy install media, and there is apparently no way to create an Amiga-formatted floppy on typical modern PC.  Of course, I was not aware of that tiny detail until after I had stolen the the machine's hard drive a while back for use in another, more pressing project.  The only idea I have seen that circumvents this process is to put your hard drive in a PC, use the WinUAE emulator to boot and load an OS onto the drive, and then move the drive back to the Amiga.  I gave that a number of tries, but I have thus far been unsuccessful in getting the emulated Amiga to find the SCSI device and allow me to load the software.

The better news is that I recently had someone contact me (yes, in response to a newsgroup post) and offer to send the necessary boot media for only the cost of shipping.  I jumped at that, and I'm now playing the waiting game to see how long it takes to get here.  Being the big spender I am, I have offered to pay for priority shipping, so I hope to see the disks soon.  Until then, I'm using my time to further improve the machines I've already rebuilt and clean up the computer room (no small task).

I have some ideas for making all these computers "useful" as a group, but I have not yet settled on a formal goal.  With 10 days left in the month, though, I should have PLENTY of time. :)

2 comments:

  1. It's too bad I didn't know of your situation earlier! I would have sent you my spare Amiga OS 3.0 (and/or 3.1) disks for the cost of shipping!

    Ah well. Hope you're able to resurrect the A3000, they're great machines!

    -CJ

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  2. I never had an amiga 3000, but the amiga 2000 is what i had it was a great machine.

    even the old commodore 64 i still have a few around the place.

    steve

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