Imagine being able to boot up a copy of Amiga Workbench, and then access all of your files on an SD card through the parallel port. Well, I could imagine it, which is why I bought it. It sat on my desk until I decided to hack a copy of Workbench in order to get access to the required drivers so that the Amiga can see and use the SDBox.

My Amiga system setup is nothing special; the physical setup is a bit more elaborate. I do not have a physical floppy drive, or a hard drive. It is nothing more than the bare bones Amiga 500 motherboard with a Kickstart ROM selector, a HxC floppy emulator, and a shiny new power supply.

The HxC floppy emulator does not support reading from ADF disk files, so they need to be converted into HFE files. I was using an online tool for the conversion, which resulted in HFE files that were not loading successfully in the HxC device. I switched to using the HxC software to convert the files, and the files started working after that.

I chose to remove a few printer related files and the notepad application from the ADF image, since you do need to make room in the image for the SDBox related files. The notepad application was a good choice since it was fairly large in size in Workbench 1.3.

When preparing your SD card, it is important to keep in mind that the SDBox only supports one partition is 4 GB or less. I had wasted some time trying to figure our how to access the 2nd partition, before I realized it did not support that.

Once the modified Workbench is loaded, you can open up a terminal and run these commands:

type devs/SD0

Case sensitivity does not seem to matter in most cases.

mount SD0: from devs/SD0

The SD card should be mounted at this point, or you may receive an error. You can check the contents by switching to the drive and getting a directory listing.

SD0:
dir

Categories: Amiga, Hardware
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