New Amiga Owner Wants Opinions

[Floid]

levelLORD wrote:
I'm not quite sure what are you referring to, but if you are trying to use HD  disks in Amiga 500, that wouldn't work. You need DD floppy disk to copy from source to destination. Destination disk must be DD disk. Source disk, I assume is DD. Which app are you using for disk copy?

Regards,

levelLORD

The main difference is the little hole in the corner of a HD (High Density) disk.  If you have 2.x and are trying to shuffle things back and forth with the built-in CrossDOS support, you'll have to wedge something sturdy into the hole - without interfering with the disk - and cover it with tape.  Most HD floppy mechanisms use a physical switch to detect the hole, so it has to be enough to push it down as an old DD floppy would.  If you're only using them in the DD Amiga drives (pre-1200), they shouldn't have switches/sensors for such, so that wouldn't be a problem.

Next up are slight differences in the ferrous emulsion of the disk; the magnetic sensitivity specified for DD and HD is a bit different, since HD needs higher 'resolution' in the magnetic layer, and the magnetic write power was a bit different between the two specs, etc.  You could often get by without worrying about it (I own a bunch of DD disks 'doubled' with a special punch back when HDs were more expensive, and the converse has held for quick transfers using the 'hole-blocking method above), but it's something to consider when looking for reliability.  Further, if you're trying to read decades-old floppies, you have to consider they may have degraded naturally by now...

...or your floppy could be out of alignment, or just need a simple cleaning.

If the power supply is a problem (I don't have schematics around, so I couldn't tell you if it supplies a voltage *only* used by the floppy and nothing else), there's nothing 'holy' about the mysterious C128-style plug.  If you're positive that's the problem, and have half an ounce of soldering skill, you can slice the power supply cord about 3 inches back, pull out a continuity tester/ohmmeter, match up the colors to a new set of connectors of your choice (a DIN could probably cram in that spot on the 500's backplate, with some creative bending of pins?), and do the simple resoldering on the 500 and the PS.  If you *do* do this, the savvy thing to do is to get 3 of your favorite new sort of connector - one for the power supply cord, one for the 500... and a third to solder on to the possibly-flaky original square connector, so you're left with an 'adaptor stub' around if you ever want to try reusing the supply on a normal machine with the original connector.

And/or you could just clean the power connections with some WD40 and pipecleaners...  (Don't use lubricants on the floppy heads, though!)

[Floid]

carls wrote:

Spending money on scandoublers and VGA monitors is useless when you just want to play games. Hooking up your miggy to the TV will work just fine.

Yep.  That said, it *is* convenient to be able to use an off-the-shelf VGA at what feels like a 'normal' resolution.  If you have an OCS/ECS Amiga, a delacer is a nice investment (and some aftermarket boards were made that wedged into a 500, too).  

You seem totally obsessed with calling the smaller Amigas "toys". I can agree to a certain point, but that's not always a bad thing. Why fork out huge amounts of cash on big-box Amigas when you won't use all their potential?

The original poster is new to the scene, so it's important to point out that the 500 and 2000 (HD or not) is practically the same machine, as far as chipsets are concerned.  The big difference is the size of the case and the expansion potential, but the 500 was popular enough that pretty much every form of hardware addon released for the 2000 also saw a version that could somehow be strapped to the 500.  (Though maybe not from Commodore, and maybe not as 'plug and play' easily, in the case of accellerator cards and the like.)

I wouldn't trade my A1200s for any A2000HD in the world. OCS graphics and a 7MHz 68000 - how unprofessional :^P

Yep.  If I were serious about it, I'd trade my 2000HD for a 1200, just to take advantage of the PCI busboards and the like of today.  (And of course, to clarify, 1200s have IDE controllers built in, hard drives aren't an issue, stock AGA has the screenmodes that work on regular VGA monitors if you've got one of those little silver adapter dongles for the video port...)  

But if you're mostly using it to get your retro-fix on, a hard drive and a network connection add some convenience, and there are probably one or two things that run on an 'old' box that don't sit so well under AGA.  (Of course, those things probably require a 1.3 ROM and the hard drive and any memory expansions disabled, too.)  You can drop Ethernet or USB cards into a 2000 - convenient, if you can find an IP stack to use with them - but you can also just hook a 500 up with a null-modem cable, and use oldschool BBS software to transfer files back and forth... or PPP or SLIP over the serial line with an IP stack on either hardware.

[Floid]

Crumb wrote:
as someone said you can cover the HD hole with tape...

Just as a followup, I've never found tape alone to work well enough.  The little switch-pin in a high-density drive will usually just puncture or dent the tape, rather than getting held down, and you'll sit there in DOS (or on your *NIX machine), wondering why it won't let you format it in the older, wider-track fashion.

Then, when you try using sturdier tape, then you discover that it screws up the way the disk sits in the drive, and you have trouble inserting/ejecting it.

So the ghetto solution I've found is to fold up a scrap of paper and wedge it in the hole before taping, which works long enough to copy over a cool demo or, one supposes, a 'terminal emulator' with XModem (or ZModem, or Kermit...) file-transfer support so you can use a null-modem link instead.

If you're serious about 'making your own floppies,' you could probably find some plastic, Dremel off plugs of appropriate size, and crazy-glue some 'patches' of transparency film over the top and bottom to hold it on.

But at that point, you may as well be on Google, and seeing who still produces and stocks 'real' DD media in this day and age; there must still be a demand for it somewhere in government, if nowhere else.