Amiga 500/1200/CD32
The Amiga came in a variety of shapes and sizes, but for the purposes of this topic, I'll keep the discussion to the two models of Amiga I use regularly - the CD32, which was basically an Amiga 1200 in a console-shaped box with a CD drive, and the normal Amiga 1200. For those who have never used an Amiga before, they typically didn't have harddrives installed and worked primarily off of the floppy drive port. The Amiga will automatically boot up whatever is in the floppy drive when you turn the machine on, without having to input any commands. This is neat for games because you can treat game floppies the same way you treat games on any other machine, just insert them and turn the machine on.
The great news is that the Amigas have a ton of awesome utilities and options available for people looking to format shift their games. First of all, most Amigas will support and internal hard drive, even if a harddrive isn't standard. On both my CD32 and A1200 I have an Amibay Compact Flash -> IDE kit installed for 2 4 gb Compact Flash cards inside working as the harddrives with Workbench 3.1 installed:
Getting a CF kit installed on a CD32 is a bit tricky, as the CD32 strips out almost all of the normal Amiga 1200 connections. The CD32, for example, is missing both a floppy drive
and a floppy drive connection, along with the IDE port. Luckily, the CD32's back edge connector has these pins still present, even if they're unused on a stock CD32. Similarly lucky is that 2 expansion devices, the SX-1 and the SX-32, exist that will add back the normal A1200 functionality to a CD32. I have an SX-1 installed on my CD32:
That's an SX-1 with the top off, which is how you access the IDE input on the thing. With the SX-1 open, I can pop in the CF->IDE kit and install a CF harddrive. the process is much more straight forward on a normal Amiga 1200 (being that they were built with harddrives in mind to begin with). After installing Workbench on these systems, I then purchased WHDLoad, a commercial (sold online) program for Amigas that lets them run floppy games from a harddrive. Very few floppy games allowed themselves to be installed on a harddrive like normal, but WHDLoad will let you rip your floppy game into a WHD image that can be mounted and loaded through a virtual floppy drive on these machines. WHDLoad uses a bit more ram than normal, so 2mb (4mb recommended) ram expansions are necessary for both machines.
WHDLoad is nice, but we want our machines to function as originally as possible. Having to boot into Workbench and click on some icons isn't how these games were originally loaded, they were supposed to be self-booting floppy disks. There are, thankfully, a few options one can use to restore this feature to these machines.
A stock CD32 will treat it's CD Drive just like a floppy drive. Upon boot up, even if a floppy drive is present via the SX-1 or SX-32, even if the harddrive is present, the first thing the unit will try is to spin the disc and read the CD Rom as though it was a floppy. Though the CD32 was billed as a console, peaking under the hood at how it all works reveals that it's just a normal amiga with a slightly unique boot up ROM. The CDs themselves are treated just like huge floppies with a bootsector containing a file called CDTV.TM. CDTV.TM is a file that is required to make a CD game self booting and identify as a floppy. The CD32 looks for CDTV.TM in the bootsector, and if present, it'll then begin looking at the CD like it's a floppy, launching whatever script is in the /S folder on the CD like a normal floppy.
With this in mind, we can create self-booting CD games that behave like a floppy. To do this, we need a few tools:
* A normal, modern PC running WinUAE and the kickstart roms, which can be legally purchased here: http://www.amigaforever.com/
* A CD Burner on said PC
* CDTV Developer's kit (Not readily available for purchase, but if interested shoot me a PM and I can direct you to someone who owns the rights to said kit)
* MakeCD for Amiga (the unregistered demo floating around online is fine)
* WHDLoad32: (registered version preferred) http://www.whdload.de/docs/en/cd32.html
To build a self-booting CD, first configure WinUAE to boot up into Workbench, setting up the emulator to use a folder on your PC as thought it was a harddrive (this is where our disc image is going to output to). You'll also probably want to get an ADF image of the game you're going to format shift.
On the PC side of things, configure a folder with all the contents of your self-booting CD. This means the folder that'll contain what will become your CD should have an /s folder with an appropriate WHDLoad32 script inside, along with the WHD files from your ADF. If you're unfamiliar with what a self booting game's contents should look like, what I did to learn was download a self-booting title from RGCD:
Like this Turrican collection (which I feel confident linking to because Factor 5 themselves have the games available to freely download on their website)
Just follow the example from his iso on how to build your folder. You can even use his own scripts to load your WHDLoad32 files, which I did. I dunno if RGCD minds if you use his scripts as a template, but I asked him about this one time and he didn't seem to get upset, so YMMV.
Anywho, after you have a folder with the appropriate content on your PC, open up MakeCD and feed it the folder as a source. Because you have that mounted folder inside the folder mounted as a harddrive, Workbench will see it as an amiga folder and treat it as such.When you add the folder as a source, you'll see a button that says "Boot Options." Click this and select "Add CDTV settings to image" which will request a trademark file. Browse to your CDTV.TM file from your developers tools and click save.
Click Create ISO and set your ISO Prefs to match the screen above. Click "OK" then "make image file" and let MakeCD run. It'll spit out an iso into the folder you have mounted. Close WinUAE and go to windows and burn that ISO like any normal ISO. That CD you burn will now be a selfbooting WHDLoad CD that can run the floppy game you fed it as though it was a floppy.
This isn't that complex once you get the process down - the most difficult part is configuring WHDLoad correctly in your /s script. Beyond that, it's a good way to transfer your floppies to CD. The downside, of course, is that CD32 CD-Rom drives are dying and a normal A1200 doesn't have a CD Rom Drive to begin with.