In Part One of this series we talked about my failed attempts to recover data from an Amiga Hard Drive using a USB/IDE adapter.
Then in Part Two we setup Amiga Explorer on a Windows XP machine connected to the Amiga over a Serial cable:
By the end we could launch Amiga Explorer and see my 4 Hard Drive partitions. We were tantalisingly close!
The next step was to copy our ‘Kickstart’ ROM from the real Amiga to a file that we could use in WinUAE:
Right-click Kick.rom and select Copy:
Paste the resulting file into C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Amiga Files\WinUAE\:
Right-click each HDF (.hdf) file and select Copy:
Paste the resulting files into C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Amiga Files\WinUAE\:
Note: At 15MB MyndHD was the smallest file and, although the screenshot suggests 50 minutes, in reality it was a few hours. In total the 4 files took the best part of 2 overnight sessions to copy over.
Suggestions on the forums are that you can increase the baud rate from 19200 to get better throughput, however, I couldn’t get any other settings to work.
Right-click each HDF (.hdf) file and select Properties:
Make a note of the UAE Mount Information and Device (DH#) for each HDF file as you’ll need it later:
The final step was to import everything into WinUAE and configure an approximation of my Amiga 1200 Hardware:
Launch WinUAE and click the Paths section:
Click Rescan ROMs – note that ‘A1200’ is available:
Click the Quickstart section and configure as shown:
Click the CPU and FPU section and configure as shown:
Click the Hard Drives section and click Add Hardfile:
Browse to the WinUAE folder, add Workbench.hdf, configure Surfaces, Reserved, Sectors and Block Size as originally shown in Amiga Explorer and click OK:
Repeat for Games.hdf, Personal.hdf and MyndHD.hdf (respecting the original order of Device numbers from Amiga Explorer, i.e.: DH0, DH1, DH2 and DH3.)
Click the Save Configuration section, enter a Name (I went with; “Amiga1200”) and click Save:
Finally, the bit we’ve all been waiting for, click Start in the bottom right:
The emulated Amiga powers on, boots into ‘Renegade’ Workbench 3.0 and reveals to the world the computing platform of choice in my late teens!
Note: I’ve also changed the ScreenMode Colours back to 256 in time for this screenshot.
For anyone interested my Amiga partitions were:
| Name | Device/Size | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Workbench | DH0/30MB | The OS plus all those little programs like Powerpacker, DPaint etc |
| Ram Disk | N/A | Not a Hard Drive at all but an area of Memory and a great excuse for a poor icon-based joke! |
| Games | DH1/85MB | HDD-installed versions of games such as Flashback, Monkey Island and Jetstrike plus a Speccy Emulator! |
| Personal | DH2/30MB | Game designs and other pixelly work plus some poorly scanned low-resolution photos |
| MyndHD | DH3/15MB | Among other things my ‘offline’ diaries from 1991-1999 – I’m not sure if I dare revisit the ramblings of my teenage self! |