Gotek in my external Amiga floppy drive?

[part12studios]

Hi there, so I have one of those original commodore external 3.5" floppy drives for the Amiga 500.. and it works on my A1200.. it has a good drive inside it but my A1200's internal drive has a bad head i think (spins up but DF:???)

So I bought a basic Gotek amiga drive and was going to install it inside and even just ordered a newer A1200 mounting bracket for the gotek, BUT it got me thinking maybe I could take the good drive from the external and put that in the amiga (just to keep it more original) and the gotek could go in the external which would also be nice since i could have it face me and see the display easier..

Would love some thoughts on this. maybe none of this would work or some but hit some snags along the way?

I did find this video [ Show youtube player ] but it's in german and no comments so I couldn't ask him if my situation would work like his did.

I feel stupid now thought because i had one of these external drives too (like this video) but when the drive went bad i didn't have the courage or insight back then to try to restore it..

Thanks,
Caleb

[Mikerochip]

I'm not 100% sure but, it should work fine, swapping the drives with no modifications as long as your A1200 isn't an Escom one, from what I've read.

What are you going to use the external Gotek for?

Lots of games only boot from the internal drive. (Even though the system itself can boot from drive 2, the software may not work)

[part12studios]

yea, no it's an original commodore Amiga.

hmm good point about the DFO vs DF1.. might abandon that plan for that reason..

[project23]

Yeah unless you can rig up a DF0 selector it isn't very useful.

On an A500 its great, because it basically becomes DF0 and you can easily see the gotek display etc etc... But I myself would like this to work on my A600 too, and, well, you'd have to cut a couple pins from the CIA chip i think and delicately wire in a switch to the motherboard. It'd be a hell of a tricky job just for a DF0 selector and there'd be no going back!

Maybe you could take the DF0 floppy cable out of the back of the A1200 and run it in a circular floppy cable to the back of the external. Provide it with power, and if you rigged it up right it'd be an external DF0. You could then use another on the actual floppy port for DF1 if you wanted, too.

I'd try it myself but there isn't much room to take the floppy cable out of the 600

John

EDIT: The reason i'd like this myself is because my external gotek faces me, in my current setup, and reading the oled is really easy.

[part12studios]

yea i'm not that hard core Maybe at some point I would considering going completely usb but i think having a physical floppy option is good because dang it if you don't find yourself coming across some old disks somewhere..

[project23]

Sometimes for the truly nostalgic experience, floppy is the only way

[part12studios]

truth!

[solarmon]

I'm also looking to use a Gotek drive externally, but for now I've put my Gotek internally, so I can swap between it and the stock internal floppy drive as DF0:

Some images for reference:

https://imgur.com/a/BnFGl5K

But it is based on the excellent guide from:

https://www.ikod.se/amiga-1200-gotek/

I used a large (deciding between 2.23" and 2.42") OLED screen mounted on the grill of my A1200, for easy reading, and a Blackberry trackball for easy navigation.

[part12studios]

wow that is slick. i wonder about the OLED screens.. will any screen just work with a gotek? there is a guy locally who offered to sell me one for $2.. but being that mine is a vanilla gotek with an 888 display i found it suspicious that i could just hook a different screen up to it and the drive be smart enough to go from showing me a slot number to reading the name of a file.

[solarmon]

Originally Posted by part12studios

wow that is slick. i wonder about the OLED screens.. will any screen just work with a gotek? there is a guy locally who offered to sell me one for $2.. but being that mine is a vanilla gotek with an 888 display i found it suspicious that i could just hook a different screen up to it and the drive be smart enough to go from showing me a slot number to reading the name of a file.

You need an OLED display that can do I2C (as opposed to SPI). Some of them support both, but you might have to modify it from SPI to I2C.

The Gotek firmware (HxC or Flash Floppy) also need to support the chipset the OLED uses. Thankfully, both supports most of the common chipsets.

[part12studios]

cool i think for now i'm going to keep it vanilla, but if i find myself using df0: all that much i might explore it.. i pretty much run everything from HDD. not much of a gaming machine and more for music.

[part12studios]

and of course since the A1200 has a far more limited adf game selection compared to the A500 era chipset. That's been a big factor too.. still some games out there that were AGA only that I still need to play with.

[solarmon]

Originally Posted by part12studios

and of course since the A1200 has a far more limited adf game selection compared to the A500 era chipset. That's been a big factor too.. still some games out there that were AGA only that I still need to play with.

You can always use Relokick, if you want that extra bit of disk swapping...

[part12studios]

hmmm never heard of that. don't mind disk swapping.. i just wanted to play AWESOME on my A1200 but never could.. all those classic (impossible) psygnosis amiga games that would only run on my old(er) A500 back in the day.

[Ferry]

Check this out:

[ Show youtube player ]

Saluditos,

Ferrán.