using 2x Gotek drives on one Amiga loading floppy images into both of them

[turrican9]

I have 3 Gotek drives with the Amiga firmware. One of them is installed as DF0 in my good old Amiga 500 and works just fine. Now I was wondering if I installed another drive and connected it to the external disk drive connector on the Amiga 500 to make it DF1, how would this work with two Gotek drives and floppy image loading. So I boot from the first Gotek and get the menus and everything. Will it detect the second Gotek drive in that same menu so I can choose images for it? Let's say I wanted to load Wings and have Disk 1 in DF0 and Disk 2 in DF1, how would that work? Or do you have to somehow boot with DF1 as DF0 in order to select images from it?

Thanks in advance

[rfancella]

Hi,
I just ran across this myself. You have to connect the second (df1) gotek as df0 and boot. Set the slots and switch them back. Boot and set the slots on it. A real pain.
I would recommend you get the HxC firmware for at least your df1 gotek. Then you can add a button and an lcd display. With this setup, additional cost is around $18.00 and a little wiring. This allows you to browse your usb drive with the display and mount any image on the fly.

[turrican9]

Originally Posted by rfancella

Hi,
I just ran across this myself. You have to connect the second (df1) gotek as df0 and boot. Set the slots and switch them back. Boot and set the slots on it. A real pain.
I would recommend you get the HxC firmware for at least your df1 gotek. Then you can add a button and an lcd display. With this setup, additional cost is around $18.00 and a little wiring. This allows you to browse your usb drive with the display and mount any image on the fly.

Thanks for the answer. This is what I feared. Then it's not worth the hassle for me as I have A1200 and A600 with whdload setups and I also have ACA 500 for my 500s. I was thinking I should use one of my A500s for floppy games only with the Gotek. I think the solution is to just stay away from those games that requires alot of floppy swapping and just play those games on my whdload setups instead. The first Gotek I got I put inside my original mint condition A500 and did the mistake of cutting the case. However, the cutting was very nicely done with filing and everything. So it looks very good. However, had it been today I would never have cut into the case. I so much want to play with real floppy disks but my old collection of floppies are just failing. Some of them can seem okay after a scan, but next time I try them they have errors.

[rfancella]

I understand. Same here. Out of about 250 disks, I pulled out around 20 or so. Started going through them and only found one that didn't error out with two different drives. The lcd mod really works well. I'll try to post a couple pics of the mod.

[turrican9]

Originally Posted by rfancella

I understand. Same here. Out of about 250 disks, I pulled out around 20 or so. Started going through them and only found one that didn't error out with two different drives. The lcd mod really works well. I'll try to post a couple pics of the mod.

Thanks in an advance if you want to post pictures.

I started going through my 23 year old DD floppy games collection yesterday and realised that alot of them had just lost/got corrupt data from the long storage but was usable if formatted. I always assumed that all the games that didn't work had broken disks. This is why I earlier had concentrated on using some old HD PC floppy disks. These were not reliable at all. They could work fine one day and the next day they had errors. I have read about using HD disks that were already formatted on PC first will never be reliable for Amiga DD drives.

Anyway, I came to the conclusion yesterday that I should try and format my Amiga game disks using X-copy pro WB format with verify enabled. Many of the disks of course had errors that I could not fix with X-copy and many gave me red '8's' (Cannot verify blocks) that I could pass pressing 'R' (Retry?) several times. You get the option R or C when WB format with X-copy pro detects errors it cannot verify. I found that the 'C' just continues without retrying to verify the block. Anyway, many of the error blocks could be verified by pressing 'R' several times. What happened is that when I reformatted them the next time the error blocks were gone. Also, many of the disks with games not working formatted all green first time. I think I ended up with about 125 of about 150\160 disks that I managed to get all green through WB format with verify enabled. I then started to rewrite games on to some of the 125 healthy disks using ADF Blitzer on my A1200.

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by rfancella

Hi,
I just ran across this myself. You have to connect the second (df1) gotek as df0 and boot. Set the slots and switch them back. Boot and set the slots on it. A real pain.

Can you not just swap the USB flash drives when you want to set the slots for the second unit? (i.e. use the first unit to set slots on one flash drive, put that flash drive it in the second unit then use the first unit again to set slots on another flash drive?)

[turrican9]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

Can you not just swap the USB flash drives when you want to set the slots for the second unit? (i.e. use the first unit to set slots on one flash drive, put that flash drive it in the second unit then use the first unit again to set slots on another flash drive?)

I don't think that information is stored on the flash drive but in the Gotek drive?

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by turrican9

I don't think that information is stored on the flash drive but in the Gotek drive?

Hmmm, some experimentation is in order - for some reason I thought it was written to the Selector.adf file?

[rfancella]

You know, i think you are right. With the HxC firmware I belive the slots are stored in the config file.
With the Cortex, I think I will test both.
Either way, the ability to browse the usb drive from the Gotek and mount whatever floppy image you want makes the mod well worth it.

[rfancella]

Here are some pictures of the mod in this thread.
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80662

Thanks,
Ron

[Jope]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

Hmmm, some experimentation is in order - for some reason I thought it was written to the Selector.adf file?

It is written to the selector.adf.

[turrican9]

Originally Posted by Jope

It is written to the selector.adf.

Then it would be easy to just take the USB drive from Gotek DF1: and put it in Gotek DF0: to select what images you want to load up for DF1:. Then switch back again and problem solved. This is good news. Actually makes it quite a viable option to use two Gotek drives without any mods.

thanks for the info. I will test this one day by installing one of my Gotek drives in an external floppydrive casing.

Edit: Example. I want to load up Dune II. I then just put the USB drive from Gotek DF1: into Gotek DF0: and boot up. Then I select all the Dune II ADF images and save. Then just put DF0: USB drive back again in DF0: and do the same for that one. I can now boot up Dune II and select any of the Dune II disks in any of the two Gotek drives.