Thursday 25 July 2013

AMIGA ADF Transfer Kit [Hardware Review]

About a month ago I was lucky enough to meet a lovely car-booter called John. His son had moved away to follow his career in the police force and left his parents his old toys to sell on... one of these toys was an Amiga 500.

Having not seen one in the wild for almost 20 years I promptly asked him how much it was, sadly it was way out of my price range. I explained this much, and left him with a reasonable offer and as it turned out he was unable to sell that day at the car-boot. So by 7pm that night I had my first Amiga 500 and a cupboards worth of games.

Although there were many gems in the set such as Alien Breed 2, Lemmings, Sensible Soccer, Future Wars and the Settlers I found myself longing for other titles. This is where I started to regret my purchase as I realized I may never get to play some of the games I bought the system for.

Enter the Amiga ADF Transfer Kit by ikonsgr74


As pictured for eBay
I ordered the kit for a measly £14.99 complete with boot disk, transfer lead, and PCI card as I was unsure if my PCs on-board ports would work. It turned up in 3 days so I didn't have to wait long. Once I had downloaded the appropriate software from the sellers file dump I was ready to get started.

The kit works by utilizing the AMIGA's floppy drive to write ADF images that are transferred via your PC's parallel port. You simply start up your AMIGA with the included boot disk, wait for the floppy's access light to stop flashing then insert your compatible floppy disk, run the software on the PC, then in just over a minute you have a usable game disk.

{This also works the other way around too, so you can backup your existing floppies! but I haven't tried this yet - Anton}

Now before the inevitable shit-storm of piracy arguments break out, riddle me this... how can someone on breadline wage justify collector's prices on a game he has never actually played? You can't. Back in the day we could grab a demo disk off our favorite magazine but times moved on. So thanks to the kit I have had the opportunity to try a wealth of games I would have never come across by chance and now they are in my hunting list.
Boom-Chica-Wahwah!
I am not entirely sure if the gent who sells them writes the software, but he sure is helpful on utilising it. I had no issues running the software on my Windows 8 gaming rig aside from not knowing I needed to install DOS-BOX first. So make sure you do that.

If you have an AMIGA 500 this is a great solution for trying out games before you pay silly money on them.

Verdict: THUMBS UP.

Available from ikongr74.

---EDIT---

Thanks for the review and your support Anton!
Now, allow me to answer your questions you have expressed in the review:

- Dos box need to be installed ONLY for 32bit version of the program (for 32bit OS), AND ONLY if you want to transfer an amiga disk to adf image to pc. So maybe a more accurate title for the review should be: "pc to amiga/amiga to pc adf transfer kit", as it actually works on BOTH ways!

{Have edited title to something more suitable - Anton}

- The actual transfer freeware program,called paradise,is made by an Italian guy many years ago,but unfortunately it was "dos only" program. So what i did was, to create the windows application (along with the Amiga boot disk) which enables to use this program on any modern windows OS -even 64bit-, and of course simplifies the whole procedure so much (no need to write any command lines on Amiga or pc) that you don't even need an Amiga monitor! I use it mainly this way, and judging from the photo in your review, this is how you used it yourself too ;-)

You can add this info in your review if you like.
Thanks again for your interest and support,

Best regards,

John.

[ikonsgr74]

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