Back to the classic

As my kids are now in an age (5 years), in which they start liking to play computer games, I decided to dig out my old a600. I bought that machine years ago, when I wanted to add a hard drive etc., but never had time for that.

I also got some discs and some joysticks (competition pro of course) with that machine. And they really enjoyed some of the games. They even think, that this "Amiga" is better than the Wii a friend of them has ;). Well, I think not everybody might agree with that.

But the downside is, that I don't have many games and not many for 5-years old at all. They are good at playing Barbarian, but "Prepare to die" might not be the right message for them. But they like the head kicking green guy ;).

So I decided to write some new discs, but how? My PC has no disc drive any more of course, the a600 has no network.. and I did not want to buy additional hardware.

So it was time to get my old a3000 from my parents house! I plugged it in and a gray screen appeared, "loading kickstart 2.x", but it failed. I had a SuperKicksStart Disc, but that seems to have r/w errors. Hmm..

I removed my cv64 and the serial card and .. it came up! I removed the battery before I stored it away, so I was lucky with that. Quit a nostalgic feeling, when I saw my old workbench. I have some backups of it, but only on DAT tapes, needless to say, I don't have any SCSI cards anymore to connect my drive to. After replugging the ZII and the ZIII card they worked again, so it must have been some dust there.

So I have another machine to write Amiga floppies. Still no network :(. I googled and found Cloanto's Amiga Explorer and liked the idea. I even found an old NULL-modem serial cable and wanted to plug it into my PC. Argl, it does not have a serial port either, something I thought it would have of course.

So I grabbed the old laptop of my wife, it luckily has a serial port and a ethernet port, and it was quite easy to see all drives and drive contents from the amiga on the laptop. Cool ey?

But it was really *difficult* to work with amigaOS for me. Quite scary. I have a BSC serial card, which should give higher speed than the amiga serial. But how do I find the right device? How do I test, which screen mode my TFT can handle without rebooting all the time?

Nevertheless, there will soon be some new games for my kids. Any suggestions?

PS: just in case you are interested, I am working on j-uae again, fixed quite some nasty bugs, added smaller stuff and hope to release a new version soon ;). Nothing promised of course.