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Amiga Internal PC Floppydrive interface .

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 that goes certainly for amiga compatible Floppydisk drives.

Amiga Internal PC Floppydrive interface how it works.

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 more recent models were more and more cost reduced, resulting in signals no longer present or at least very difficult to reach, to provide compatibility for Amiga systems.
For that you had to scratch through print tracks, pull wires and disconnect IC legs and connect them.
Another way to achieve compatibility eventually emerged, an internal PC Floppydrive interface where the redirection and generation of signals was done at the interface itself, so that the Amiga can do its job properly without the hassly of modifying PC floppydrives.

Connecting the Amiga Internal PC Floppydrive interface.

The Amiga Internal PC Floppydrive interface is simply connected between the Amiga connections and the Unmodified PC Floppy drive.

1.  Floppy drive cable connector coming from the Amiga Mainboard
2.  Floppy Power cable connector coming from the Amiga Mainboard
3.  Floppy drive connector going directly into the Unmodified PC Floppydrive
4.  Floppy Power cable going into the Unmodified PC Floppydrive

Amiga Internal PC Floppydrive interface details :

The PC Floppydrive brands tested with Amiga Internal PC Floppydrive interface were of various brands, Teac, Epson, Panasonic, and were all unmodified drives 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 Amiga Internal PC Floppydrive interface in combination with a unmodified PC Floppydrive 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.
(actually, due to the composition of the disk surface, it is not recommended to use HD floppy disks anyway)

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