Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: slaapliedje on June 21, 2012, 04:41:11 AM
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There is an epic (well okay, for the few, the proud, the Amigans...) battle going on over at OSNews.com in a news item about Icaros. I thought it was funny.
Basically one person is arguing that external floppy drives were extremely common, and very useful because a lot of games were multiple disks, and disk swapping was a pain.
The other person says that external floppy drives were too expensive and that there weren't really that many multi-floppy games, and even if there were, they weren't very popular!
So far there really has only been one other person who has piped in that said external floppy drives were pretty common.
Join in the battle! http://www.osnews.com/comments/26095
Really, I remember back in the day, my brother had bought the A500 off of a friend of his, and he had an external floppy drive, as did my friend and his older brother (which by the way, at one point his older brother decided it'd be a good idea to try out the null modem connection to play stunt car racer, and he connected the parallel port to the serial port, causing smoke to rise up from my friend's A500... well he got the fatter agnus upgrade for free out of it (well if memory serves me correctly)).
The external floppy drive my brother had ended up dying on him, so I'm going to side with the "they were common, but they're rare now because of high failure rate."
slaapliedje
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Back in the day, our machines (2000, 500, SX-1'd CD32, 1200) always had 2 floppy drives, even with hard drives installed. Backing up disks, installing multidisk programs, and moving files between machines in the pre-network days was made much, much easier with multiple drives.
Now that CD-R, Ethernet, and disk imaging are common, I get by fine with a single drive.
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External drives were extremely common, all my had friends them. I got several. Basic rule of diskdrives, keep attached as much as the powersupply gives juice :)
I even remember games with two disks or more not supporting external drives were considered badly programmed.
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ALmost everyone I knew had 1 external. I don't know if many people had more than one.
I have a hard time thinking of many games that were just 1 floppy.
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I have so many external drives, even back in the days these were quite cheap here in the Netherlands.
I had 2 with 2 A500's.
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I remember during the A500 days, the number 1 upgrade for most people I knew was the 512Meg expansion followed by the second disk drive. Everyone I knew with an Amiga had both (making a second disk drive extremely common from my perspective.
Also, as someone pointed out here, if you had a multidisk game that did not take advantage of the second disk drive, you generally got pretty annoyed with the programmers since swaping disks sucked.
You used to also feel pleased with your purchase with the the few games that noted you had extra ram etc and this was going to be used to enhance your experience.
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No matter how smart the content of a site is, the comments section is always a retardation exhibition.
Every Amiga owner I know had two floppy drives, FWIW.
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Back in 1990-ish (dear God, that was 20-odd years ago!) a guy in the local Amiga user group had a dual external drive. Everyone I knew had an external drive. When I bought my first Amiga 500, it came with an external drive.
I didn't know any Amiga user who used a stock system. Hell, even the one guy I knew who had his Amiga solely for games had an external hard drive for multi-disk games. Odd argument to have.
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External floppy drives were extremely common where I lived, everyone had at least one extra, many had 2.
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External DD floppydrives were (and still are) extremly common, external HD floppydrives are a different story. All but one friend had one or more external drives, I purchased both a DD and a HD floppydrive to my first Amiga. Today I have 17 DD and 2 HD external drives, some connected but most in storage.
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I've had A500, A2000, A1200 and currently A4000.. Never had any external floppy drive(s) ;-)
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Yep, every Amiga owner I knew had an external drive. Pretty much a necessity as we all know. External floppies back then were as common as internal hard drives are today. ;)
For someone to argue otherwise, probably never owned or used an Amiga in the 80's. Either that or he's confusing the Amiga with another platform. I didn't know too many Apple ][c owners that had external drives. Then again, I didn't know too many ][c owners. lol ][e people almost always had that single unit dual drive deal sitting below their green monochrome monitor. :laughing:
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I had one, so did everyone I knew who copied games for each other (ie everyone).
I even remember us pooling our resources and daisy-chaining three to try and enjoy Monkey Island II.
I can`t imagine who`d say otherwise really, non-users I guess.
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Yep, every Amiga owner I knew had an external drive. Pretty much a necessity as we all know. External floppies back then were as common as internal hard drives are today. ;)
For someone to argue otherwise, obviously never owned or used an Amiga before.
he stated that where he is from most or all of people he knew with an Amiga did not have an external\second disk drive... please think about it, the necessity you mention was not always available in many parts of the world.
its sad how many Amiga users from the western countries forget about the rest... :(
i for eg never owned an Amiga in the late 80's and early 90's...most i saw and used were my mates who also did not have a second disk drive with their Amiga setup.
only time i saw some external disk drives were at "shops" and "swap meets" where the copying of an original game\program was done for a fee.
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the number 1 upgrade for most people I knew was the 512Meg expansion
I must say i doubt that just a little. Even an 80 MB harddrive was big bucks back then, let alone a 512 MB ram expansion... :-P
I wasn't even aware a humble A500 could adress such a large area of ram. ;-)
Or do you mean 512 KB? Those were slightly more common compared to 512 MB... Oh well, KB, MB: who minds a factor of 1000 more or less.. :-)
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he stated that where he is from most or all of people he knew with an Amiga did not have an external\second disk drive... please think about it, the necessity you mention was not always available in many parts of the world.
May not have been a necessity to some in the literal sense, but c'mon - a non-hard drive, single floppy system back then was a total compromise. Everyone I knew that couldn't afford an external drive at the time of purchase (including myself when I bought the A1000), that was the very first thing they saved up for. Well, that and some RAM. :)
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I had an A500 back then with 1MB and only the internal disk drive. Playing the Lucasfilm Adventures (Monkey I+II, Indy, ..) with that was very painful, and finally i saved up some money and bought a cheap external floppy. Waaaaaay better. Ever since i started using the external floppy, it was like a whole new world (especially since i could not afford a HDD) :)
I say pure win for *everything* is better than the single built-in drive. Kindwords spellcheck disk in the second drive.. made things easier. Not having to swap to disk 2 of Monkey Island 1 every time you opened a door (because the door sound was appearently on disk 2) - yay! Working with Basic and some example programs on a second floppy...
- G
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definietly second disk drive was a God sent but just to explain myself and so our friends from the west can visualise, earnings and prices in eastern europe until maybe say early 1990's ?
Poland 1986, average monthly wage of a Polish worker was $26, prices of some of the imported goods you could purchase with USD, GBP or DM in specialty shops PEWEX;
so for eg when i finally saved up for my Atari 65XE in 1989, for the first year i had to borrow the casette player from a mate if i wanted to load games :(
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While multi-disk games and copying were a lot better, the main reason I bought a second drive was to prevent the "Floppy Shuffle". That's where you would load Workbench and then try to run some program from Aminet or Fred Fish and you get "insert volume WB1.3" it whirrs for 1 second then "insert volume xxxxx" a second later "insert volume WB1.3" and this continues on for several minutes!! I've swapped disks maybe 20 times before the program will run. If you had a Hard Drive that would eliminate this problem, but an extra floppy was much cheaper in the 19080's.
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I used Amiga 500 for around four years without external floppy drives and swapped like mad.
Then I got external floppy and I started replaying all the multidisk games of the past, again, because I loved playing with less swaps. Some games didn't support external drive, and insisted the disk to be entered in DF0: (Copy protection, lazy coding, coders not aware of possibility of extra drives and hardcoding everything to the internal floppy), but they were in the minority. The external drive made some games pretty much playable, which were unplayable with the internal floppy. For example King's Quest VI required more than 30 disk swaps to show you the intro screen.
The external floppy helped in productivity software and compilers as well.
I remember putting all header files of SAS_C that I used on single floppy which was on the external drive and I didn't need to swap disk to compile. Or I used external floppy with MOD files and I listened to them while programming.
The only minus of the external drive is that it allocated some memory. There are tricks to reduce the memory usage by lowering the buffers, but the best solution was to turn off the drive. The better external drive models had on/off switch on the back. It was useful for anti-clicking as well.
Currently I still use Amigas extensively, but I use external 1 TB hard drives.
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I for one have read every post about this fascinating debate and I can't wait to learn about more minutia about external floppy disk drives
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I for one have read every post about this fascinating debate and I can't wait to learn about more minutia about external floppy disk drives
I think you forgot your Text goes here tags ;)
- G
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May not have been a necessity to some in the literal sense, but c'mon - a non-hard drive, single floppy system back then was a total compromise. Everyone I knew that couldn't afford an external drive at the time of purchase (including myself when I bought the A1000), that was the very first thing they saved up for. Well, that and some RAM. :)
To put his words into perspective:
USA guys, please understand that in Poland where he (and I) lives/lived external floppy disk was as uncommon as floppy drive for small Atari. I owned Atari (my father saved for it over a year) from early 1990 till 1994 and I NEVER SAW ANYONE with floppy drive for it, me included. Not even in local "game clubs" where you could sit and pay for game time (that was my first computer experience, not counting reading local IT magazines). I NEVER SAW anyone with "big" atari (ST/Mega/...), which I dreamed of.
A500 was totally out of reach for like 99,9% households in the 80's, and for like 97% till 95. In highschool (93-97) I borrowed money from a bank to buy Sega Megadrive (12-months contract), and saved another month for my first cartridge from local shop, where I could swap it for another at 10% of full price -- it was the only way to afford games for me. When planning to buy Sega I calculated, that I could buy bare A500 if I was saving for 20 months. And I worked :-).
You probably can't imagine situation like this, but in Poland if you entered a "computer shop/computer club" any time till 94 (then our copyright law was stiffed), it was granted that on monitor you'll see X-COPY, laborously copying another disk for another kid for a relatively small fee. It was the only "software" other than games known to most of Amiga users :-). Couple dozens of dollars for a game was just impossible for us to afford -- in Poland you could live for that for a month :-).
To recap, I also never saw an Amiga with external floppy. And my cousine (also working student), happy Amiga 1200 owner could afford to buy his first accelerator (030/8MB) for Amiga in year 2000... PowerPCs and 060 we experienced mainly in magazine reading :-)).
That's what it looked like in developing countries from behind the "iron curtain".
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I for one have read every post about this fascinating debate and I can't wait to learn about more minutia about external floppy disk drives
Great!! I'll send you a copy of my 589 page self published novel "My Life As A Floppy". You'll laugh, you'll cry, it will become part of you ;-).
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I always found it was just a matter of what subsection of users you dealt with, but that's a pretty obvious observation.
In our loosely based computer users group back in the day, the guys into gaming were generally the guys with the A500's with no HD's and a bunch of extra floppy drives.
The guys I associated with mostly were big box Amiga owners (BBS dweebs) running single floppy systems with hard disks. We were probably some of the very few people back in the day that never really gamed on our Miggy's.
Still remember getting my A3000 and being just staggered at the MASSIVE hard disk that came in it, which IIRC was a 40 MB drive, lol. In the days where most people had never owned a HD equipped computer, that was just incredible to us.
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Great!! I'll send you a copy of my 589 page self published novel "My Life As A Floppy". You'll laugh, you'll cry, it will become part of you ;-).
I'll take the unabridged edition, please. Need something to hold down my copies of "The Decline of the Roman Empire" and "Encyclopaedia Galactica."
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I had A500 without external floppy. with 512Kb expansion, you'd get roughly same speed in Xcopy because, iirc, it cannot access both drives at same time.
most games we played were on one or 2 diskettes, except adventures. and those ext drives were expensive, just like any other Amiga peripheral.
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To put his words into perspective:
USA guys, please understand that in Poland where he (and I) lives/lived external floppy disk was as uncommon as floppy drive for small Atari.
Not agreeing isn't the same as not understanding.. ;-)
No one said that nowhere in the world did most localized users not have a second floppy.
That being said, the Amiga wasn't a low end computer.
Even the A500 wasn't low end.. It cost some bucks...
I would think, even in Poland and elsewhere, a percentage of people who could afford that, would eventually be able to afford a second floppy...
I bought my first Amiga 500 back in the day, and couldn't afford the floppy.
Even as a USA guy.. ;-)
It was quite a while before I could afford a 2nd floppy.
I got really good at customizing my WB floppies and using the RAM drive.
But all the while, I was saving up for a second floppy, and eventually bought a cheap one...
I wouldn't be surprised if that type of action wasn't common among Amiga owners without a lot of money, regardless of where they lived.
And yes, I'm sure there were also people who couldn't afford even that...
Even in the USA..
desiv
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If the Amiga situation in Europe was the same as the C64 situation, I'll believe that external floppy drives were rare there. In Europe the datasette remained the main data storage device for the C64 and external floppy drives were a lot more rare there --- in fact in Europe there were all sorts of fast loader devices/software for making datasette loading faster. Here in Canada (and I assume the USA) most people dumped their datasettes when upgrading from the VIC-20 to a nice new C64 with 1541 drive.
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A few Poles posting here so I am curious: I have heard mention from a friend who grew up in Chechoslovakia, that machines with 68K processors were not sold to the communist bloc, due to the power of the processor, and its suitability for military use. Any truth to that?
Could you get apple, atari or amiga machines before 91 from import shops? (assuming you had saved up of course)
If the Amiga situation in Europe was the same as the C64 situation, I'll believe that external floppy drives were rare there. In Europe the datasette remained the main data storage device for the C64 and external floppy drives were a lot more rare there --- in fact in Europe there were all sorts of fast loader devices/software for making datasette loading faster. Here in Canada (and I assume the USA) most people dumped their datasettes when upgrading from the VIC-20 to a nice new C64 with 1541 drive.
Europe is sort of a funny thing. What was typical in scandinavia wouldn't be typical in Italy etc.
At least from personal experience in Denmark, external floppies were quite common. Hard drives somewhat less so.
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BS - I bought an external drive way before the 512 KB upgrade. Later, I connected it to my then new A3000 - 2 drives were pretty much standard.
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I'd say 512K expansion is much more useful to A500..
anyway this is one of those st00pid internet flaming discussions.
it doesn't really matter if those floppies were common or not.
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Great!! I'll send you a copy of my 589 page self published novel "My Life As A Floppy". You'll laugh, you'll cry, it will become part of you ;-).
HAHAHA good one... oh and put me in for a copy too :roflmao:
Mech
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When I got my A2000 way back then, I got a 2nd internal drive with it. Later on I got a harddisk, kept the 2nd floppy. Again later I got an external HD floppy, and sold the 2nd internal one.
I still have that ext. HD one.
Tom UK
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There is an epic (well okay, for the few, the proud, the Amigans...) battle going on over at OSNews.com in a news item about Icaros. I thought it was funny.
Basically one person is arguing that external floppy drives were extremely common, and very useful because a lot of games were multiple disks, and disk swapping was a pain.
The other person says that external floppy drives were too expensive and that there weren't really that many multi-floppy games, and even if there were, they weren't very popular!
So far there really has only been one other person who has piped in that said external floppy drives were pretty common.
Join in the battle! http://www.osnews.com/comments/26095
Really, I remember back in the day, my brother had bought the A500 off of a friend of his, and he had an external floppy drive, as did my friend and his older brother (which by the way, at one point his older brother decided it'd be a good idea to try out the null modem connection to play stunt car racer, and he connected the parallel port to the serial port, causing smoke to rise up from my friend's A500... well he got the fatter agnus upgrade for free out of it (well if memory serves me correctly)).
The external floppy drive my brother had ended up dying on him, so I'm going to side with the "they were common, but they're rare now because of high failure rate."
slaapliedje
Hi,
Don't know about your groups, but everybody in my group had four 3.5 floppy drives and at least one 5.25 drive. Later we all bought 5-10 meg hard drives, that's right you young whipper snappers I said megabyte, not gigabyte hard drives. Paid about $100 a megabyte too!!! (ok a little less I paid $495, but there was shipping charges and insurance don't forget).
smerf
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Yeah my first hd was 20Mb - only a bit bigger than the cache in my CPU today!
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A few Poles posting here so I am curious: I have heard mention from a friend who grew up in Chechoslovakia, that machines with 68K processors were not sold to the communist bloc, due to the power of the processor, and its suitability for military use. Any truth to that?
Could you get apple, atari or amiga machines before 91 from import shops? (assuming you had saved up of course)
Europe is sort of a funny thing. What was typical in scandinavia wouldn't be typical in Italy etc.
At least from personal experience in Denmark, external floppies were quite common. Hard drives somewhat less so.
How are ya mate?
As far as I know and remember, yes there was an embargo on many items in order to stop them being sold to the eastern block countries.
I can only speak for myself and from what I remember and experienced when living in those times. Possibly other members from larger cities such as Warsaw and Krakow can share their memories?
The local Pewex shop in my town only had Atari 8bit computers, very limited selection, 65XE and XC12 and some Joysticks.
During the time from 1987 to about 1990 I have never seen any other computer on sale in this shop. There were no Atari ST’s, no Amigas and no Apple computers.
Please note that even in Poland depending on geographical location there were significant divisions in what computers majority of people owned or wanted to own. I lived in south west of Poland and for the life of me I cant remember anyone owning a C64, everyone I knew and all the citizen clubs (Miejski Osrodek Kultury) had Atari XL\XE’s.
From a circle of about 20 to 25 people I knew who did own Atari XL\XE only 3 owned Disk Drives and that’s including the citizens club and the two guys who had families in USA :)
This is then very interesting because once the Amiga vs ST era approached and the wealthier (aka. Family abroad) friends who owned Atari 8bits begun to get their new shiny…Amigas! That’s right, most guys I was friends with and swapped Atari 8bit games with chose the Amiga rather than Atari ST!
All of the mates who did get their Amiga 500’s (imported via grey market from West Germany) never had the second disk drive.
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Thanks for the information, much appreciated :)
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Here in Sweden the common setup was A500, 1 MB chip and one external floppy.
The guy with two or three external drives, 2MB chip expansion and the homemade pause button connected to the pins of the 68000 was king of the schoolyard and of XCopy :)
The only one without external floppy I knew was the retard with Saddam virus on his XCopy, who stored his floppy on top of his tv, nobody wanted to swap games with that guy.
Harddrives and other serious hardware upgrades was only used by people who did professional stuff like animation.
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Although I used the hard drive for most things, back then storage was expensive. My 350MB hard drive cost me £350. So when I invested in an XL Drive 1.76MB I pretty much stopped using the inbuilt floppy drive of the A1200. Was a touch slow but did the job. First thing I do with an Amiga is plug in an XL Drive. Always pleased when I find one when collecting.
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/a_scuzz_sept20/a_scuzz_sep20_377.jpg
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/a_scuzz_may04/a_may04_026.jpg
Also when you ran games like Sensi, before the HD install, you would stick both disks in, one in the internal and one in the external and they would happily disk swap between the drives. One problem I did have occasionally with the VidiAmiga set up was if I had it plugged in it disabled the drive at times. Never did get to the bottom of it.
The XL Drive was great with CrossDOS also for transferring stuff from the PC.
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I have a feeling anyone argueing that people with Amigas didnt buy a second floppy because they were very expensive, is probably mistaking the Amiga for the earlier 8Bit machines. For those, a second drive was expensive, sometimes the drives being more expensive than the computer. But Amiga floppies were cheap by comparison. I know my first purchase for my 500 was the 512k expansion, then after a couple of weeks floppy swapping to load games, a second floppy drive. Even the people I knew with 1000s had second floppy drives. They were far cheaper than hard drives or further RAM expansions. I didnt get a hard drive until I got my 2000HD but continued to use that floppy drive even with the 2000.
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I had 2 external drives stacked above the internal one on the A500. Remember being not completely content about the tilted and more compact design of the A1200 that forced a more loosely placement of the drives beside the A1200, which in turn took up more space than the bigger A500. On the other hand, I like the A1200 design more than the A500, so it was a mixed bag of annoyance and contentness. I did use all 3 drives extensively.
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Im curious. For a 1 meg machine, does 2 external drives cause any trouble running software?
I remember the manual for my floppy drive warning about memory use when you have multiple drives, but I never really thought about it, and I only had one in any event.
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It was a long time since I thought about that, but I think there were some programs that didn’t want to buy 3 floppy’s and you had to turn some of them of. I did have a hard disk and memory expansion for the A500 and it was the widest computer I ever owned. How sad to sell it back in the early nineties, but the A1200 is still here.
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I had an A500 with 1.3 Roms, 1 meg chip ram, ICD AdRam 540 with 4 meg Ram & AdRam 560 2 meg = 6.5 meg, three external floppy drives.
Was great for running loads of disks on workbench, great for multiple disk games and excellent for multi disk demos, this was well before CD drives and the internet as we know it,
Did also have a hayes 2400 modem which I used to go on the bulletin board at Black Dog Towers in London uk (PD disk for bulletin boards), I dont think there were any internet browsers for the A500 at the time.
Wish I never sold that old A500 cost me a small fortune.
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I would say that almost everyone in America who actually had an amiga 1000 or 500 had a 2nd drive. The operating system was powerful enough that 1 drive cramped you up so hard that you needed the 2nd drive to do anything but play 512k games. Even with the ram disk. 2nd disk came first, before fatter agnus, before 1+meg extra ram.
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If the Amiga situation in Europe was the same as the C64 situation, I'll believe that external floppy drives were rare there. In Europe the datasette remained the main data storage device for the C64 and external floppy drives were a lot more rare there --- in fact in Europe there were all sorts of fast loader devices/software for making datasette loading faster. Here in Canada (and I assume the USA) most people dumped their datasettes when upgrading from the VIC-20 to a nice new C64 with 1541 drive.
Hi!
I can not confirm that. I started with an C64-I (Breadbox) around 1987/88 and it came already with an 1541. My brother and several friends who were lucky enough to also own a C64 back then, all had disk drives. In fact i did only learn about the datasette later when i saw someone using a datasette on a C64 and asked them what they are doing with that ;)
KR,
- G