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Setting up your SD
card
You may
find your Minimig is supplied with an SD card already but if not
you'll need to buy one (or borrow one from something like an old mobile
phone). I would recommend at least 64MB but the more the better, 1GB
is probably ideal and easily available. I've heard the Minimig is
quite fussy and only works with some cards. Sandisk cards report to
work very well.
Plug your
SD card into your PC (or Amiga, Mac etc). You'll need to copy a
Kickstart rom to your card. If you have something like
Amiga Explorer
you can copy your Kickstart rom from your real Amiga. If you do not
have a real Amiga I've been informed
Amiga
Forever
roms work okay although I've not tested this.
You'll also need the Minimig firmware. On a traditional Amiga this
is on a chip built into the Amiga but as this is still licenced it
cannot be shipped with the Minimig. You can download a firmware file from the
ACube
website. At the
present time you may find the ACube firmware (or firmware file on
your SD card if supplied with one) only works with a traditional CRT
monitor. Fortunately someone has released an updated firmware that
not only works well on American NTSC screens but LCD monitors too.
See the link at the bottom of this page for the download.
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Copying games to
your Minimig
Your
Minimig reads ADF files - images of Amiga floppy disks. You can
transfer your original disks by using something like
Amiga Explorer which creates an ADF file as it copies the
disk from your Amiga. Alternatively there are many ADF downloads
available on the internet, a quick internet search should reveal a
number of sites. Note that copyright still exists on most games so
ensure you own the originals or stick to freeware programs.
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Saving files on
your Minimig
Although many Amiga games work quite nicely without having to worry
about this, you may want to save your progress in some. Apart
from saving game positions it's also useful to be able to save
things like your doodles in DPaint, drum patterns in Sonic Drumkit
and programs in AmigaBasic. At the time of writing the Minimig
firmware doesn't have the facility to save to the SD card.
This leaves one only one option to preserve data on your Minimig:
saving things on the Ram disk and then transfer your files across a
serial cable to another computer. I've successfully set this up
relatively easily using my existing null serial cable and Amiga
Forever software in exactly the same way as my 'real' Amiga. I've
kept the same serial settings at both the PC and the Minimig end and
it works great. You don't have to have your PC on the whole time
either, just turn the PC on when you want to transfer some files
to/from the Minimig. You do need to keep the serial cable plugged in
at both ends though.
For many games that need to save to a floppy disk unfortunately this
doesn't work because they only allow saving game positions to floppy
(or ADF in the Minimig's case). There's a few games (such as The
Bard's Tale) that need write access to the floppy drive to even run
properly but for a select number of games, and especially
applications saving to the Ram disk is an option. You'll need a
serial transfer program and cable to do this, there's several
options out there, I'm using
Amiga Explorer coupled with a decent
null modem cable. I've successfully
transferred AmigaBasic and DPaint images to and from the Minimig
using this method.
The
Amiga Explorer site has excellent tutorials on setting
this up for use. Once you're up and running you can access the
Minimig's Ram disk (full read/write access) and DF0 (read only
access at this time).
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How to re-order
your SD card programs
The current Minimig firmware doesn't list
the contents of your SD card in any obvious order. In fact it's
listing the files by 'Date Created' with the oldest at the top of
the list. If you're using Windows you can modify the creation date
to
effectively re-order your SD card.
- In Windows Explorer list the files by Date Created (Don't forget
to view by Details. You will probably need to add the Date Created
column by right mouse clicking the column bar at the top). List the
files with most recent at the bottom. This is now the order they are
displayed on the Minimig.
- To change the Created date of the file copy the file then paste it
into the same folder.
- It will create 'Copy of xxxxx'. Delete the original and rename the
new copy to the original name. The file will now appear at the
bottom of the list. This method is obviously very limited but the
only method I know of at present until we see a firmware update.
I've used this technique to successfully place all my Workbench and
application ADFs at the bottom to separate them from the games.
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Some useful links
ACube -
Minimig manufacturer
AmigaKit - Suppliers of the Minimig
based in the UK
Amiga.org
- Visit this forum for solving technical queries
Amigaworld.net - Another excellent Amiga forum
Cases -
Follow this forum thread at Amiga.org for more info on the cases
yaqube's firmware update - Follow
this forum thread for the NTSC/LCD firmware update
Amiga Forever - Buy licenced Roms
plus the useful Amiga Explorer for transferring files via serial
port
Minimig wiki page
- Wikipedia info on the Amiga with further links
Minimig Open Circuit wiki
- Excellent resource including a list of what works and doesn't
TheDaddyreview
- An early review of the Minimig including another compatibility
list