[TomCrazy]

Originally Posted by TomCrazy

... it's a PC drive that has been slightly modified to work on Amiga. However, the way it's modified at factory (or the retailers?) makes it work only with Escom motherboards that has not been floppy fixed. The drive will not work with Commodore motherboards without futher modification.

I would like to correct myself here. It was a while since I tested this disk drive on my A1200, but when thinking it through I realized that this is not entirely correct.

"Escom" PC drives are configured to work with Escom motherboards. If you hook up an Escom floppy drive to an A1200 motherboard, it will still work. However, it will be having some problems due to how the signals are routed. Some modified PC drives have a wire going between pin 2 and 34 on the floppy connector, which makes the change disk signal to be routed into both into the change disk and ready pin on the Amiga.
What this basically means is this:

1. The PC drive will work fine only when the ready signal is not needed. This goes for Workbench and other DOS programs.

2. Hooking up an external drive while the internal PC drive is connected will make the external drive not work properly. This is because the external drive then cannot generate the ready signal properly since the PC drive is is trying to counteract that signal with a steady high or steady low state, depending on whether the disk is inserted or not in DF0.
This completely interrupts the wired-AND connection between the internal and external floppy drives and will make programs that require the ready signal not work at all, even on the external floppy drives.
This problem does not occur on Escom motherboards since there is a break on the Escom board between pin 34 of the internal floppy connector and the floppy control circuitry.

Originally Posted by trydowave

Hi. Just thought i'd post this video as a follow up:

[ Show youtube player ]

I put the my A500 drive into the A1200 and it loaded Apidya first time no problems. Didn't even have to adjust settings on boot. I will try more games later. I now believe that this crappy pc drive is the only offending item.

Question to TomCrazy. Do you still want me to check the back of the mb for that scratch/hair? Or do you think it's safe to assume that its only the floppy causing the issues.

Thanks
Tony

It's great to see you got it working with the A500 drive, although it wasn't much of a surprise to me. It wasn't difficult to figure out what was going on when I saw the pictures of your motherboard and your PC floppy drive.

I think it looks like a scratch on the motherboard judging by the pictures but nah... You don't have to check it since it's obvious now that it was the floppy drive that was causing problems.

It's a good thing Apidya worked without even having to change any settings in the early boot menu, but keep in mind that there are many games that will not work without changing these settings. And some games will only work with relokick, and some won't work at all unless you boot them on a genuine A500.
In such a case, you don't have to be worried that your floppy drive is at fault. As long as several games work with the shugart drive that didn't work at all with the PC drive, it's safe to assume that the shugart drive is working as it should.

Originally Posted by FOL

Drives we sell, work fine. Haven't come across a disk it doesn't read yet.
Works exactly like the original, I have one in my own A1200.

Are they genuine shugart drives in the sense of having the ready signal on board? Are they DD drives or HD drives? Do they come with a LED in the front (the internal A1200 ones)?
It says on the site that they are brand new. I'm wondering where you get them from? I thought there wasn't even one company left on this planet that are still manufacturing floppy disk drives, especially shugart ones...? What brand are they?

Originally Posted by trydowave

I was looking on your site. there definitely affordable enough but when i read closer it says it has a green led? The one that came with my A1200 had this and it was a modified pc drive!

I think you were looking at this floppy:
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...roducts_id=106
This one has a LED, but that is because it's an internal drive for use in bigbox Amigas (A2000, A3000, A4000 etc).
When I was talking about floppy drives not having a LED on the front, I was talking about floppy drives for Amigas like A500, A600 and the A1200 which doesn't need a LED on the floppy unit itself since there is a floppy LED on the shell. If the floppy has a LED on the front anyway, it indicates that this floppy drive is not made to be specifically used with A500, A600 or A1200, but rather with any one of the bigbox Amigas or a PC.
If there is no front cover on the floppy and there is no LED, that means it's made to be used with any Amiga that is not of a big-box type.
If you want a floppy drive that not only electrically fits your A1200, but also physically fits well in the case, then you should try to find one that is designed to be used with A1200. And, like I said, the ones that are do not have a LED on the front.
Of course, some big-box Amiga drives with LED might fit electrically with your Amiga 1200, but they might not fit physically which can be a problem.

This is the floppy drive you should be looking at.
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...roducts_id=294
I don't know if it's a genuine shugart drive with the ready signal on board, but I assume it is since people in this thread have written that it works great for them on their Amigas. So I think you'd be quite safe to buy one of those, although I personally haven't tried one of them on my Amiga.

Originally Posted by trydowave

Whats the difference between yours and a shugart?

Probably none. I'm not part of Amigakit, so I think it's best if the staff of Amigakit tells us whether their drive is a genuine shugart drive or not. But if it has all the signals that a shugart drive has, and all those signals are routed correctly, and if the gain in the amp stage of the floppy drive is set to a level that works well with DD floppy media (PC drives with HD floppys use a different gain), and if all other signal levels and timing are in compliance with the shugart interface standard, then it is a shugart drive to 100%.

If you get a PC floppy drive that has the ready signal on board and has been modified to work with Amigas, then it will be shugart compatible, although I wouldn't like to call that a 100% genuine shugart drive in such a case.

Originally Posted by trydowave

TomCrazy says I should get a Shugart. still doing my research.

Ok, let me rephrase that. You don't necessarily need to get a shugart drive, but you should at least get a shugart compatible drive.
In either way, it should work without any problems regardless whether you get a 100% genuine shugart drive or a shugart compatible PC drive.
...Unless you happen to put in a game disk with a totally weird track loading routine like Pinball Dreams for example, which will work only on a 100% genuine shugart drive and not on a PC drive, even if the PC drive is supposed to be shugart compatible. I have been doing some research but haven't managed to find out what is causing this. But nevertheless, that is not much to worry about since it's only like 1 game out of 200 or probably even less that has such a weird and mysterious trackloader.

But in conclusion, if you want the floppy drive to work with every game without any hardware limitation, then you should get a true shugart drive that was manufactured for use with the A1200 in the first place.
But this is of course only if you care about those 0.1% (or less) of the games that doesn't work with shugart compatible PC drives.

Originally Posted by trydowave

The seller said he got it from Vesalia. As far as I know they ship the same drive as amigakit. Dosent this mean that it wont work? Or maybe the drive got damaged somehow when it was sent?

I took a look at the vesalia homepage but there was no picture of the A1200 floppy drive, it only says EUR 22.90 in the listing which makes it difficult to tell if they are the same.
Do you know if Amigakit and Vesalia are using the same supplyer of floppy drives?