ScuzzBlog: Diaries October 2020 Entry 16th October 2020: Post 1: MultiDOS PlusBench - Updated to read PC disks. MultiDOS PlusBench - Updated to read PC disks. Last couple of days I have shown how to create your own Workbench disks from old Amiga cover disks and the like. No actual Amiga WB disks were actually used in the process. I have now enhanced further the Workbench and added more content. Today I decided it was time to make the disk work with PC disks. And so I set to adding the very wonderful MultiDOS to the disk so I could do just that. First though I needed to create a few suitable PC disks. Time was you could format PC disk to 720K. These lower capacity disks are the ones that the basic Amiga floppy can read. Time to fire up the Win98 machine and create some 720K disks. Once completed I cover the top left hole with a sticky label. I also added a few PC disks to the disks, albeit Amiga files currently stored on the PC. here goes. I have my PC disks at the ready together with the August 1992 cover disk from Amiga Computing with MultiDOS included. To edit the disk requires it to be renamed to MultiDOS. So what I did was copy my PlusBench disk and renamed the fresh copy. I also had to ensure that the disk had around 80K free and so I ran DOpus and deleted a couple of files from C. I checked the disk was working and opened the cover disk to check the contents. I next booted using the cover disk. One thing I didn't make clear yesterday and that was any of the earlier Amiga Computing disks boot into their own Workbench, which can be very useful if you don't have a Workbench disk. With Amiga Computing running I then placed the renamed MultiDOS disk in the DF1: just to save some disk swapping. I then ran the install tool and in no time I had a modified version of my disk with the MultiDOS software on. Next I mounted the drives using the CLI and the special script. This mount MD0: with DF0: [ Amiga ] and MD1: with DF1: [ Amiga ]. I placed my first PC formatted disk in the drive and it immediately was recognised by the Amiga. I was able to copy the contents of the disk to RAM: I then used the special PCFORMAT tools to format the PC disks as PC disks and then copied back the files from RAM. All worked without a single problem. And so now I have PlusBench set up with the ability to view PC disks. That's one better than 2.04 which could not read PC disks without CrossDOS. I do intend creating a further two disks with extras and fonts. But with my extras on the disk and not the ones found on the 2.04 set. I can definitely provide way more useful tools than the ones originally shipped by Commodore. So watch this space. MultiDOS PlusBench - Updated to read PC disks.

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Last updated 16th October 2020

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