Understanding Physical Disks and ADF images?

[jewettg]

In playing with my Amiga (still exploring and learning) - I have come across various types of drive images all in ADF format. Some will mount and show the contents of the image, others will tell me the disk is uninitialized (will not open). I have learned through reading - and successfully created a physical floppy version of the odd-behaving ADF image and then I can boot from it, usually a game. Sometimes it boots and other times it gets stuck during the boot process or shows me a "cracked by" screen I have no idea how to get past. I have tried press all the keys and joystick buttons - to no avail.

So, my question is - in today's times, there is there no way to mount this floppy disk images and see the contents? Are they really in that weird of a format that the Amiga knows how to boot from them yet can not read them otherwise? It just seems odd to me that no one has come up with a method of reading these disk images, or writing a add-on for workbench that allows us to open them?

 

[Boing-ball]

In playing with my Amiga (still exploring and learning) - I have come across various types of drive images all in ADF format. Some will mount and show the contents of the image, others will tell me the disk is uninitialized (will not open). I have learned through reading - and successfully created a physical floppy version of the odd-behaving ADF image and then I can boot from it, usually a game. Sometimes it boots and other times it gets stuck during the boot process or shows me a "cracked by" screen I have no idea how to get past. I have tried press all the keys and joystick buttons - to no avail.

So, my question is - in today's times, there is there no way to mount this floppy disk images and see the contents? Are they really in that weird of a format that the Amiga knows how to boot from them yet can not read them otherwise? It just seems odd to me that no one has come up with a method of reading these disk images, or writing an add-on for workbench that allows us to open them?

Game disks are copy protected. Although you mentioned Cracked games, they still don’t conform to standard AmigaDoS standards and therefore why they cannot be opened up in workbench.

History lesson. A lot of the older games you maybe trying and not booting/working maybe coded to only work on older Amiga Kickstart versions like 1.2 or 1.3 for the A500/A1000/A2000 systems. If you have higher ROM versions then this will stop older games from working.
To get these to work you will either need to downgrade your Kickstart version using a physical ROM or a ROM switcher device. Or software by use of a relokick.

These days people use something called WHDLoad on a bootable HDD/CF or SD card. As a lot of these games have been converted to use WHDLoad.

WHDload read up here:

WHDLoad

whdload.de

 

[Templar]

There are simply the DOS disks (which you can see the contents on the Workbench) and the Non-DOS disks, which you cannot (mostly because they use their custom bootloader; deep assembly stuff).

Have to tried to press a mouse button?