Floppy Cable

[toddbailey]

Got a couple of easy questions.

First off, building an A4000 system of parts from ebay,
Just purchased a pair of standard dens floppies from amigakit, not sure if I should have held out for the hi dens drives or not.

Anyway as part of the cabling, I have 2 floppy cables, one has a twist typical of what you'd find in a pc of not too many years ago, the other is straight through.
The drives came preconfigured as df0 and df1, my questions is what cable do I use?

next question, turns out the 3000 and 4000 shipped with high dens. drives, how do the machines know what drive type is installed, and is using std dens drives ok for either machine?

also, if any one has an a4000 desktop case OR an A3000 internal floppy drive with the bottom bracket for sale body,div,table,thead,tbody,tfoot,tr,th,td,p { font-family:"Arial"; font-size:x-small } let's talk


thanks all

[hooverphonique]

you need a straight through cable 34 way ribbon cable with IDC connectors either end. if you are mounting both drives in the same machine, you will need to move some jumper(s) in order for df1 to be internal.

the high density oem amiga drives have additional circuitry in them that lets the amiga clock out a pulse train on the ready pin, identifying the type of drive and disk currently inserted.

[toddbailey]

Originally Posted by hooverphonique

you need a straight through cable 34 way ribbon cable with IDC connectors either end. if you are mounting both drives in the same machine, you will need to move some jumper(s) in order for df1 to be internal.

the high density oem amiga drives have additional circuitry in them that lets the amiga clock out a pulse train on the ready pin, identifying the type of drive and disk currently inserted.

before your reply I checked amiga-kit, they have floppy cables except there's have the cable twisted between df0 and df1:

so either someone is wrong, it doesn't matter or the cable I looked at were for a different model.

[Jope]

Amiga floppy cables should have 4-6 twisted.

[hooverphonique]

sorry, I was a bit quick there.. The 4-6 twist in the cable serves only to control the activity led of the second drive (without the twist both drives light at the same time). Both internal df0 and df1 spin their motors simultaneously even when only one of them is actually in use, because they share the motor pin (this is different in a pc with 10-16 twisted).

[Jope]

Yep, the drive lights go wonky if you don't have the twist in place, or the drives are in the wrong order on the cable.. The behaviour also depends a bit on the model. It doesn't hurt anything, but looks silly and of course if you have a disk in the other drive, wears down your disk. :-)