I Am Teh Awesome

[Archie]

I've had this TOSEC torrent of Amiga ADFs (not to mention several GBs of otherwise-downloaded ADFs) for several months now. I've not been able to play any on my A1200 or CD32, despite knowing how to do it for ages now. Obviously I couldn't transfer the ADFs on disk as they're too big for 720k, and although I had TwinExpress which I could network with, it was on CD and my CD32 doesn't have a keyboard (which you need at the amiga end), nor does my A1200 have a CD drive. For ages I've been looking for a reasonably-priced Amiga CD drive or keyboard, without success.

So this gamut of classics was sat there unused for ages, I didn't want to play them on emulators. I'd bought these Amigas (well, I earned the A1200 by spending a day working on a mate's car) and dammit, I was going to play some classics on them. I even tried running TwinExpress between my CD32 and PC as a test, and it didn't work. Another obstacle.

Yesterday, I finally look at the TwinExpress files on this networking CD and it turns out, after all this time, the program is miniscule. Miniscule enough to fit on a 720k floppy with space left over. After contorting to kick myself in the head for a while I set up a partition on the PC for all the games I wanted, which I spent about two hours extracting from this TOSEC compilation. I transferred TwinExpress to the A1200, got the serial link set up and connected, ran TwinExpress on the A1200 and, with no small amount of trepidation, typed c:\twin\twin into the PC's DOS prompt and waited for the response:

>>> Communication is established with the remote computer <<<

WHOOP-DE-FUCKING-DO! FUCKING YES!! :D

Some fiddling later (the connection is fairly slow, not to mention actually writing the ADFs back to disk with transADF, both of which are quite temperamental) and I can play all these games the way they were meant to be played™. It's gonna take ages to sort all this stuff out (I've got about 400 disks strewn about the room now, many of which are duplicates, none of which I can be sure are working), but I'm on cloud nine today to have got it working finally

Note to anyone who tries this: on a PC, TwinExpress only works properly in real-mode DOS. Apparently Windows doesn't like programs trying to access COM ports directly, which I discovered when I tried it from a command prompt and it didn't work, claiming something was wrong with my COM port, which until yesterday had never been used.

[mrchu]

Seriously, well done, much praise deserved for your effort! I downloaded said Tosec compilation (and boy are there some dupes!) but I've not been as hardcore as you...I just emulate....I even bought a network kit a while back...anyway I digress, well done and enjoy....fellow amiga fans rejoice. (make sure you play deluxe galage, myth, captain planet....that a500 classic...and god knows, EVERYTHIN!)

[Archie]

When I said 400 disks, this was the stuff I had already (I used to have an A500 when I was at school, somehow it disappeared but the games didn't). I've only copied about three games across so far. There's lots of dupes in the games I had before and stuff that doesn't work, so it's going to be great to get rid of the copies and use all the spare disks to dump more classics onto.

Seriously though, how much smaller would that compilation have been if they'd not put all the different-language variants of each game and the differently-cracked copies? Never mind. I'm now onto downloading the 9.5GB torrent of CD32 games..

[mrchu]

I know man, it was wayyyyyyyy too elaborate but I guess I can't complain...it's better than nothing.

I'v got a CD32 in a wardrobe somwhere....never got many games for it tho....I was blown away by microcosm and it's fmv intro....no doubt you'll get the chance to play that 9.5 gigs from now good downloadin mate

[warci]

i've downloaded the complete games/programs/demos/PD/CD32 TOSEC's, but i haven't played any of them out of lazyness

I've got just about every WHDload game on my 30 gig hard drive on my 1200, and that works a gazillion times better than messing about with floppies.

Gonna write the CD32 stuff to cd soon though, too bad i don't have a cd32 and emulation on the 1200 isn't allways flawless.

Still, good show! now get a pcmcia network card and make the whole transfer-thing fly B)