Shop: External Floppydrive for the Amiga

External Floppydrive for the Amiga.

Many Amiga disk drives have lost their lives over the years, and over the years it became more and more difficult to get hold of a real Amiga floppy drive that worked well and reliably. fortunately a good alternative appeared many years later in the form of the Gotek Floppydrive Emulator .
Yet there are still many people who want to work with an ordinary physical floppy drive, for example to retrieve data from old floppy disks.
With the Amiga machines going out of production, and years later the decline of floppy drives in general, floppy drives are almost impossible to get and external enclosures are an even bigger problem.

Replacement External Floppydrive for the Amiga.

Over the years it has been found that a number of models of PC floppy drives could be made amiga compatible with the necessary tinkering.
The very oldest drives by means of jumpers and solder pads, the newer models were more and more cost reduced, resulting in the signals needed by the Amiga that were no longer present, or difficult to access.
For that you had to scratch through print tracks, pull wires and disconnect IC legs and connect them.
Another way eventually emerged, an External interface where the redirection and generation of signals was done that the Amiga needs to do its job properly.

Connecting the External Floppydrive for the Amiga.

The External floppydrive for the Amiga comes with its own interface, which you connect to the floppy port on the back of the Amiga.
For the wedge commodore's (A500, A600, A1200) it will then appear as DF1: , for the bigbox machines it will appear as DF2: (this is due to the logic of the bigbox machines)

The external floppydrive for the Amiga has no possibility to loop through another drive, if you still have an old Amiga drive you can hang this drive as the last one in the chain.

External Floppydrive for the Amiga details :

The brands used for the external drives are of various brands, Teac, Epson, Panasonic, and are originally intended for PC systems.
The Floppy drives for PC systems are not compatible with Amiga if you connect them directly, but that's where the interface comes into play.
The supplied interface ensures that the signals are sent to the right place and signals are created that the amiga needs.

The External Floppydrive for the Amiga is 100% compatible with a 'real' Amiga disk drive, Xcopy, track loader demos and various testing tools all do their job without errors or compatibility issues.

The only drawback this solution has : if you use HD floppy disks (1.44mb) for your Amiga software, you have to tape the hole, otherwise the drive will read the disk with different settings than the Amiga expects.
(Incidentally, due to the composition of the disk surface, it is not recommended to use HD floppy disks anyway)

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