Boot selector for the Amiga 1200 / 600

Boot selector for the Amiga 1200, from just an idea to a finished product.

And recently there is now a 3rd part of the Bootselector Saga, the boot selector for the Amiga 600 / Amiga 1200.

Guess what : after some brainstorming I came up with the idea that it should be possible to build a boot selector for the Amiga 600 and the Amiga 1200 that could be installed without soldering or modifying your Amiga 1200 / 600.

The traditional boot selectors for the old(er) generation Amiga's do not fit as they still used a CIA on a socket where they would be installed between the socket and the chip.
The Amiga 600 and the Amiga 1200 have exchanged that socket version for an SMD version that requires much less space, but is also not easy to remove / replace.

Boot selector for the Amiga 1200, The initial idea 

Now I did not come up with this wonderful principle of the Amiga 1200 Boot Selector myself.
I got the idea from a post on Ikod.se where one splits a floppy cable and mounts a switch on the floppy cable to activate EITHER the internal drive OR the Gotek Floppydrive Emulator.
With that idea I started playing around, with the aim of:
easy installation of the Boot Selector for the Amiga 1200 / 600, without soldering or modifying your Amiga 600 / 1200.
And as a second requirement, unlike the design on Ikod.se, the Gotek Floppydrive must also be available (as DF1:) if the internal diskdrive is Activated as DF0: .

Boot selector for the Amiga 1200,  from designs and prototypes

So after drawing out how the boot selector for the Amiga 1200 should be connected, I quickly came up with a first prototype.
That actually worked immediately as I imagined, except for one small thing :
The external (Gotek) drive didn't show up on the Amiga 1200 as DF1: but rather as DF2:
Now that's not really a big problem, but I would rather have it working the way i had imagined it.
After some reading some, i started experimenting with different settings and finally solved the problem.
the Gotek is now neatly available as DF1: if the internal floppy drive is set as DF0:.

Boot selector for the Amiga 1200, but how on earth 🙂

The principle is very simple , you don't change the data lines ON the CIA itself but on a different location, there are several tutorials how to achieve this, but they all depend on soldering, building goteks internally or running floppy cables outside to connect the gotek .

The bootselector for the Amiga 1200 (And A600) consists of 2 interfaces , one internally between the internal floppy drive and the floppy cable, and the other one externally, connected to the floppy port on the back of your Amiga.
The only thing you need to do is bring 2 wires from the internal interface to the external interface.
And then your boot selector for the Amiga 1200 / 600 is ready to be used.