Interested in a plug 'n' play Gotek/Floppy switcher?

[Stedy]

Hi,

I have something in development, that may be of interest. I've adapted one of my old PC to Amiga floppy drive adaptors to allow you to easily swap between a real floppy drive (Amiga or PC) and a Gotek drive.


This is the development board, it was designed for ease of debug. It has a Xilinx XC9536 CPLD which does all the logic functions. The design was written using VHDL and like all my current work, will be opensource.

It's a plug and play solution, that has a few little kinks to be worked out of it, all part of the development process. You'll be able to swap DF0:/DF1: between the real drive and the Gotek. For any external drive, you would need an adaptor (which I'll design) as you need to disconnect SEL1 from the external floppy drive port and map SEL2 to the SEL1 input of the first external drive.

I've discontinued my existing V2.5 floppy drive adaptors due to dwindling sales (the picoPSU ATX adaptor will also be discontinued). Would there be any interest in this design?

Current cost estimate would be £20-£25 for the PCB shown above, I'd need to order a batch of 75-100 units to make it cost effective. From design, to available for sale would be at least 6 months, due to other commitments.

I have not costed up the external drive adaptor, it's 2x23 way* connectors, PCB + housing. *May use 25 way, hacked about to save costs.

Your opinions are welcome.

[lesta_smsc]

May not be of interest to many, but would there be any way of supporting HD disk support via this method?

[Stedy]

Hi,

The adaptor can support HD mode but I won't release the design with that support. As any HD mode requires a floppy drive to be modified and there are a myriad right and wrong ways, the support would be a nightmare. If I release the design files but do not sell the PCBs, I absolve myself of responsibility for broken drives/Amigas.

I'm reconsidering keeping the existing V2.5 design around for a while, if I can make it cost effective. I don't make much money from selling Amiga add-ons, the small profit gets re-invested into the next batch. The last batch of adaptors cost £1500 to get manufactured.

Will poll a few other forums, see what response I get.

[eXeler0]

It's an interesting idea, how would you actually swap DF0 / DF1? Physical button sticking out of the machine or software controlled?

[Stedy]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

It's an interesting idea, how would you actually swap DF0 / DF1? Physical button sticking out of the machine or software controlled?

It would be swappable via a physical switch. I did look at a keyboard option on reset but with the myriad configurations, discounted it. You can get micro miniature toggle switches.

Likely to just release this on Github as it's not been well received.