Amiga EncDecThis is a set of small tools for transferring files from a PC to an Amiga over a serial link in XON/XOFF mode. Normally it is preferable to use RTS/CTS instead of XON/XOFF, because XON/XOFF mode interprets certain bytes as control codes instead of data, while RTS/CTS uses separate wires for flow control. Unfortunately, the Amiga's default setting for the serial port is 9600-N1-XON/XOFF, and a workbench disk with the appropriate utilities is required to change that. These tools provide a means to copy more advanced transfer utilities to the Amiga, with only a bootdisk containing the 'type' command and the serial driver required to get started. The Amiga EncDec tools are free software released under the GNU GPL. Tools overviewEncode (PC) takes a binary file and encodes it so that the resulting file contains neither XON nor XOFF bytes. On the Amiga side, decode recovers the original binary file from the encoded data. Decode can be copied to the Amiga without corruption, because it is carefully written to avoid XON and XOFF bytes in its code. The Amiga EncDec tools also contain a modified version of transdisk that adds an XON/XOFF-safe transfer mode, in case you don't get RTS/CTS mode to work properly. The corresponding tool on the PC side is called adf2xdf. Note that adf2xdf and encode use different encodings (adf2xdf is more efficient), so it is important to use the right program. For more details on how to use these utilities, see the README file. For the actual file transfer, an additional tool like the ADF Sender Terminal is required. The progam and additional documentation about transferring files between PC and Amiga can be found on the DownloadThe latest version of the Amiga EncDec tools is amiga-encdec-1.3.zip (80k, source included). |
