PC (Piece-O-Chit) Floppies

[z36ra]

Anyone have ideas on how to get PC floppies working on Amiga.

I found a couple of websites that say you can do it but none that say how.

What I've found is that part of the problem is getting a drive with jumpers so you can set RY (disk Ready) on pin 34 of the floppy cable. I have had success getting drives to work when I boot with a disk in the drive but getting the Amiga to see that I have changed disks or that there is no disk in the drive is the next problem. I have also had some success when setting the drive ID to 0 (DS0).

It sure would be nice to have a nice new fresh drive in my Amigas, even if I had to use a 1.44M drive as a 880K.

How much is catweasle compared to a PC floppy drive?

[z36ra]

iamaboringperson wrote:


are you talking about the drives or the disks?

one thing i know for sure is that my A4000T came with an ordinary High Density Panasonic FDD

My 1200 also has a Panasonic (Matsushita)... That may be pronounced differently depending on your local.

I'm not familiar with the 4000 but my 1200 has a low density drive. Which brings up my next point. Some drives have a jumper to select density. I have a drive that allows this but documentation on the jumper settings is foggy at best.
http://www.teac.com/DSPD/pdf/3fd0020a.pdf

[z36ra]

Brian wrote:
I've not tested this but I've been told that it work. If you have a Sony HD drive you can switch pin 2 and 34 on the cable and the drive should then work as an ordinary DD drive in the Amiga with disk clicking and auto checking and everything.

Again I've not tried this yet but will when I need a new drive, cause a floppycable isn't as expencive as some of these "floppy controllers" out there. ;-)

I searched my drives and found an old Sony MPF420-1 and got it to work. I will post the information to my website. The trick was to set the drive number to 0 and then add a jumper to get disk checking to work.

[z36ra]

Vincent wrote:
Good to see you got it working.  A lot cheaper than a floppy controller aswell :-)

I slapped this together in a hurry. This is definately a hack as I had no clue what I was doing until I finally got it to work.
http://www.atomiccomputers.com/amiga/

[z36ra]

I got another one working today.
I will prepare the instruction on my website and have it up tonight sometime.

www.atomiccomputers.com/amiga

It's a Teac FD-235HF-3823. The jumper setting will be the same for any FD-235HF-38xx series.