Amiga Forever by Cloanto
 
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Introduction to Data Sharing

   

This tutorial explains how to:

  • Share files between Windows and the Amiga Forever emulation environments
  • Copy content from a "real" Amiga to the PC

The easiest way to share data between an emulation session and Windows, and even across different emulation sessions, is to enable the Shared drive option: right-click the desired title, select Edit, then go to the Media tab and set Shared to Local Folder. In a future version, cloud sharing may be added here.

Once this option is enabled, a volume named Shared appears on the Amiga side. To view files that have no Amiga icon (.info file), remember to select Show/All files (within the Amiga, in Workbench 2.0 and higher).

Of course, in our mission to preserve all things Amiga we did not forget about Workbench 1.3 power users. On older systems where no Show/All files option is available within the Amiga, synthetic icons come to the rescue: in the Media tab of Amiga Forever select the volume, click Edit... and enable the Synthetic icons option. This will add virtual ".info" files to help browse through content added from the Windows side.

Data in the Shared drive can be accessed by all Amiga emulation environments where this option has been enabled.

To access the same shared data from the Windows side, right-click a title in Amiga Forever and select Open/Shared.

Specific directories can be shared between Windows and the Amiga emulation environment by mounting a Windows directory as a virtual Amiga disk drive. To do this right-click any Amiga Forever configuration, select Edit, then go to the Media tab and click Add... Then in the Add Disk dialog select Type: Directory.

The Workbench 3.X configuration, listed in the Systems tab of Amiga Forever, illustrates how this works in practice. This configuration has a System and a Work disk volume. To access the content of the Work volume from the Windows side select Tools/Open Amiga Files from the Amiga Forever menu, then click Shared/dir/Work.

If your only option of moving files from an Amiga to the emulation environment is via a non-Amiga file system (for example via a DOS file system on the Amiga), keep in mind that the original Amiga file names may be lost as they are shortened or otherwise modified to comply with the non-Amiga standard. In such a scenario, to protect the original names from changes you can place the file set in an LhA archive, and then copy the LhA over the non-Amiga file system. Within the Amiga Forever Workbench 3.X environment, extracting an LhA archive is a matter of a simple drag-and-drop operation.

The following articles illustrate how to copy data from a non-emulated Amiga computer to the PC: