Please Help! Escom A1200 floppy drive problems

[magnox]

Hi,
Just a quick question if anyone could please be kind enough to help. Recieved my new A1200 escom type through the post today nice white keyboard and case compared to my other amiga.

Turned it on no problem but then when I put a couple of games in they refused to load. I automatically thought it was a problem with the floppy drive, so I opened up both cases and swapped the drive from my old amiga into the escom amiga. For some reason the escom a1200 wouldnt load games from the floppy drive from the old amiga (commodore version) even though it tried it just kept trying to access the drive, the light came on momenterily and the screen flashed and that was it no further.

So after assembling the a1200's back to their original states and swapping the drives back I noticed after booting up the original escom a1200 with its floppy drive with a different disc in it loaded, I understand there was some compatibility problems with the escom drive and some amiga disks and I heard there was some sort of fix for this?? Does anyone have any info on this please?

Also I was wondering why the old floppy drive from my commodore amiga 1200 wont work on the escom amiga 1200 as this would have been my first ideal solution, is there a conflict with the floppy drive controllers or something becuase of the escom drive being an altered drive? I'm not sure on this, any help would be gratefully appreciated

Many thanks in advance

[thomas]

It's not as easy as to just swap the drives. The Escom Amiga uses a PC drive and a hack on the motherboard to make it work. This only works with AmigaOS but not with several games (as you discovered). In order to use an Amiga drive in this Amiga you have to remove the hack. I think there are instructions on Aminet.

[trydowave]

I have this same problem it seems. Why the hell did they fit a PC floppy drive that couldn't read the entire Amiga back catalogue?

[prowler]

Here are the instructions to reverse the Escom AT1200 motherboard modification to restore its compatibility with standard Amiga floppy drives.

http://www.softpres.org/article:hard..._fdd_connector

And, if your A1200 is fitted with the Panasonic JU-257A605P (which many of them are), then here are the instructions to make it compatible with both the restored motherboard and certain troublesome games and demos.

http://www.softpres.org/article:hard...u-257a605p_fdd

[kipper2k]

I'll take a pic of the motherboard of the one i just did, it paints a thousand words

[FOL]

Ive seen two different mods for Escom boards.

Some have the wire going from last pin to first pin and other has pin 1 to pin 34 of external connector.

Or something like that, been a while since I did one.

[kipper2k]

Here's the floppy drive fix i done for the escom board.

[TomCrazy]

@magnox
I made a video about the Escom floppy fix a little while back. It's exactly the same thing as kipper2k demonstrated in his picture, but maybe it will be even more clear for you what you have to do if you watch that video.
[ Show youtube player ]

You have to remove the wire that is on the motherboard, just as explained in the video. This wire is the reason why old shugart floppy drives (that is, the floppy drive from your old Amiga) doesn't work well with your Escom motherboard.

You will know what to do it you have a look at the video and also the picture that kipper2k posted here.
After you've done that to the motherboard, you will once again be able to use your old shugart floppy drives with the motherboard, and all games should load perfectly.
(Assuming there is no other problem with your disk drive and/or motherboard, of course.)

[trydowave]

Hi Tom. Could you please look at my post:
http://eab.abime.net/support-hardwar...-purchase.html

At the bottom of the post there's some pics of my A1200.

It's about the same issues. I don't know if my motherboard is a later model or what. All I do know is this. The floppy doesn't except any of my old Amiga games!? They all come up with DF0: ???? or DF0:NDOS?

If it is a later one I'd like to find out so I don't have to take the entire thing apart, Ill just send it off to a professional. My soldering skills aren't good enough to do the fix myself.

Cheers
Tony

[Nostromo]

Sorry to bump up this old thread but I have got an ESCOM motherboard (that had the Panasonic drive) and has had the floppy drive fix removed.

Problem I am having is that NDOS games (DOS Stuff such as workbench loads fine) are not working. They give a GURU after cracktro. I am using an "Amiga" floppy disk drive from Amigastore.

Any ideas please? Thanks!

[amigasith]

Originally Posted by Nostromo

...and has had the floppy drive fix removed.

What exactly do you mean by "removed"? Incidentally, somebody else over on a1k.org also had floppy disk drive issues with his Escom board, and somebody else posted a link to a HOWTO: http://www.softpres.org/article:hard..._fdd_connector It seems simply removing the existing wire isn't enough... You also need to add a new wire - see kipper2k's picture above for an example how to do it.