Bootstrapping an Amiga without a bootable Amiga floppy
I have just released a serial port based Amiga disk and file transfer tool, amigaXfer.
It is able to read/write/compare floppies, install bootblocks, send/receive files and dump the kickstart rom.
AmigaOS 1.x, 2.x and 3.x are supported.
By disabling interrupts and polling the serial port directly, speeds as high as 512kbps are achieved, even on a basic Amiga 500 with its 7MHz cpu clock. The integrity of data is protected by CRC-32/ISO-HDLC.
Unlike most serial port transfer tools, it does not require installing and running an agent on the Amiga side, as it uses the kickstart rom s debugger to take control of the Amiga.