CompuServe Thread

J.R. There are several means of transfering files from one system to the other. 1.) Transfer by means of floppy-disks If your Amiga is equipped with Kickstart equal or bigger than 2.1 (you can find it out by simply pulling down the Workbench menu -> About. If the version numbers shown are something like 37.xx or bigger for Kickstart and 38.xx or bigger for Workbench, ererything is "built in". You should then have a soft- ware called "CrossDos". In your workbench-partition (I suggest you have a harddisk, if not, everything described will be on the system disks) there is a drawer called "storage". There should be another drawer called "dos-drivers". Inside this drawer, there should be a icon called PC0. This represents the internal drive DF0. If you double-click this icon, another dos-device will be mounted, a divice able to read and write standard MSDOS-floppies. This can be done by Shell (e.g. "Copy PIC.PCX to PC0:") or Workbench. Notice that with most Amiga models, you only can use DD (720 KB) disks. Only some of the A3000s and all the A4000s are able to use HD-disks as well. If you want to be able to mount this device "automatically", you only have to drag the PC0-icon from the storage/dos-drivers drawer to the devs/dos-drivers drawer. From now on, you will be able to use your internal floppy as described above. If you do not have 2.1 there are three ways of using floppy disks: 1.1.) Upgrade your Amiga to at least 2.1 1.2.) Buy CrossDos (works under 1.3 as well) 1.3.) Use MSH instead. MSH is public domain software, doing the same job as CrossDos, but it's free of cause. (I don't know if it's included in the libraries) 2.) Transfer by means of nullmodem cable Use a nullmodem cable connected to the serial ports of both computers. Again, there are several ways to transfer files. 2.1.) Use terminal programs on both computers. Maybe you have such programs already installed. If no, "Telix" is a very good shareware program for the PC. May- be the best terminal program currently available (not only systemwide – and I know quite a lot of systems and terminal programs), is (of cause) a Amiga program called Term (It's giftware, the current version is 4.1). It's in one of the libraries. 2.2.) A program designed for your needs: TWIN Express. It has to be started on both computers (In the package there are versions for the PC as well as for the Amiga). It understands the most commonly used commands like "COPY", "DIR" etc. This is maybe (if you do not have Kickstart/Workbench 2.1 or >) the cheapest means of transfering files. The share is not very big and a nullmodem cable isn't very expensive, too. Its available in one of the libraries. Now we come to the more sophisticated topics: 3.) SCSI-Net If you do have SCSI-hostadapters on both computers, you can connect the two SCSI-Systems with a cable. After removing the terminating resistors, the SCSI- bus covers both systems. A MSDOS-formatted harddisk can now be used by the Amiga as well. Of cause, you have to use software like CrossDos again. Without it, your Amiga would not be able to read or write data. If you are really interested in this variant, I would have to give you a much more detailed des- cription of how to manage it. (BTW: Its the kind of thing I currently use!) 4.) Parallel network In the public domain, there is a thing called ParNET. It was originally designed to connect several Amigas (and Unix machines as well) using the parallel ports and a special cable. As far as I know, there should be a PC-version as well. I have never tried that and if you are interested you should keep in mind, that without special adapter cards you would loose your printer ports. (you could of cause use switch-boxes). 5.) TCP/IP You could set up a TCP/IP-network running above the serial ports, the parallel ports or (the most sophisticated way) special network cards (ArcNet, Ethernet). I have tried that, too. If you are interested, I can give you detailed information about it (This would maybe go a bit to far…<g>) If you want to do it in one of the descibed ways but are unfamiliar with what to do in detail, just write… I hope this will help you, Gerhard …

J.R., If your A2000 has at least version 2.0 or better of AmigaDOS (and if it doesn't, you should get it, for a whole variety of good reasons!) it has included software called Cross-Dos which will allow you to read, write, and format MS-DOS disks on the Amiga. Assuming you have at least 2.0 of AmigaDOS, look in the drawer (directory) on the boot disk called Storage. There should be in it another directory called DOSDrivers. In DosDrivers there is a file called PC0: Move that file to the DosDrivers directory in the Devs directory on your boot disk. Reboot. When you insert an MS-DOS disk (low density only unless you've picked up something better than the standard Amiga floppy drive) it will show up as PC0: on the workbench and can be addressed as such from a shell window. You can do anything with the MS-DOS disk that you could with an Amiga disk (all AmigaDOS commands work) except you're still bound by the 8.3 naming convention (after all, it _is_ MS-DOS 😉 Hope this helps. Darron