Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: Chinon FZ-354 (A1200) floppy - no READY signal?  (Read 873 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline n9ytyTopic starter

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Join Date: Jun 2021
  • Posts: 13
  • Gender: Male
Chinon FZ-354 (A1200) floppy - no READY signal?
« on: February 26, 2023, 09:42:10 PM »
I had purchased a NTSC A1200 quite a few years ago, and it came with no floppies soi I installed a Gotek as one of the first modifications and then went on from there. It came with a Chinon FZ-354 drive, and I want to get it functional. I had picked up an electonica4u external floppy interface board, and it works with an external Gotek, but the Chinon won't work on there. I decided to put the Chinon back inside the A1200 and it works fine there (reads disks, boots, etc), but when running the Amiga Test Kit read test it tells me that there is no READY signal. I wonder if this is why the Chinon doesn't work on the external adapter board... ?

How to troubleshoot why the Chinon may not be providing a READY signal when mounted internally, or why the computer may not be detecting it? This is badged as "Commodore A1200" so I don't think it is an Escom unit, and the FZ-354 is an Amiga drive, not a PC drive from what I can tell. I did not take the A1200 logic board out to see if there were jumper wires on the floppy port.

Jumpers are on DS0, MM, RDY and TTL pins, everything looks the same as all information I can find online.
 

Offline n9ytyTopic starter

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Join Date: Jun 2021
  • Posts: 13
  • Gender: Male
Re: Chinon FZ-354 (A1200) floppy - no READY signal?
« Reply #1 on: February 26, 2023, 09:48:08 PM »
Ok, now I feel like an idiot. After removing the electronika4u external floppy interface, the internal drive does report a READY signal. I saw another post in my searching that talked about there only be one ready line, and sure enough that fixed things. I am trying to contact the seller about why the drive isn't working when connected through that interface.
 

Offline n9ytyTopic starter

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Join Date: Jun 2021
  • Posts: 13
  • Gender: Male
Re: Chinon FZ-354 (A1200) floppy - no READY signal?
« Reply #2 on: February 27, 2023, 04:39:24 AM »
Well, this is strange. The Gotek is running HxC firmware if it matters. I found that while the Chinon externally and the Gotek internally results in the system not seeing DF1 in either the early boot screens or in Workbench, I found that running the Amiga Tool Kit also showed that DF1 was not present… YET… If I use ATK to turn the motor on, the signals come up and it will pass the read test and calibration tests. This is strange because it seems to show that the external port is not damaged (a second gotek works on it), and the motor and all signals work (once it kicked it on ATK showed /CHG and /RDY), it is just that as an external this is not kicking the motor on when a disk is inserted. Still trying to read and learn more but this is puzzling. Booting with a disk inserted in DF1 doesn’t help either.
 

Offline n9ytyTopic starter

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Join Date: Jun 2021
  • Posts: 13
  • Gender: Male
Re: Chinon FZ-354 (A1200) floppy - no READY signal?
« Reply #3 on: February 28, 2023, 04:31:19 AM »
I found two PC drives from old carcasses that hadn't been fully junked yet, and set the Electronica4u interface to "PC" settings on the jumpers, and they both worked perfectly, disk detection, ejection, etc.  So it seems to be the interface just doesn't like an official Amiga PC drive as external. Oh well, I'm happy to now have an external that is functional! :)