Daisy chained floppy drives

[freqmax]

When daisy chaining the maximal number of drives on the Amiga. Were operation flaky due long cables and many connectors ..?

[kvasir]

When daisy chaining the maximal number of drives on the Amiga. Were operation flaky due long cables and many connectors ..?

I've never had more than 2 externals on my 1200, and they worked fine after using an A500 PSU. Between the 030 card and the 2 floppys, the 1200's infamously underpowered brick caused probs, but other than that it was ok. If you were to do that, I'd put any external drive with its own power supply evenly spaced throughout the chain, assuming the power would "bleed over" to the drives farther down, and use as big a PSU I could find. (I know the Amiga's 5 1/4" had a power hookup, not sure of any other drives though).
A bigger problem would be memory, which is something I ran into with an old A1000. Each device takes up a bit of RAM for the dosdriver, which can drag resources down a bit. As far as lengthy cables are concerned, I haven't a clue. I know people have attached a ton of floppy drives to an amiga (I knew a guy who ran a diskmag, had floppy drives surrounding him in his swivelling office chair, and he would just spin around swapping disks as copies were completed), though I'm not sure if they did anything unusual to do so.

[freqmax]

I was more interested in the pure signal-electric aspect. Memory and power will work smoothly with FPGA and PC-supply.
Otoh, the 500 kbit/s coding is not that a high frequency signal.

[kvasir]

I was more interested in the pure signal-electric aspect. Memory and power will work smoothly with FPGA and PC-supply.
Otoh, the 500 kbit/s coding is not that a high frequency signal.

Ah. Not a clue then. :-D Perhaps getting a really long 25-pin cable and running a test would help? Think it would need to be all 25 pins, straight pass through.

[rkauer]

Don't use more than 2.5m (meters), counting all external drives or you'll have problems due signal reflection.

 More than this will make your dog catch fire, your daughter get pregnant and your son becoming a transsexual thing. And, worst, microsh!t will take the whole computer world for Bill's wish.

[amigaksi]

When daisy chaining the maximal number of drives on the Amiga. Were operation flaky due long cables and many connectors ..?

All the amiga external drives I know of use short cables, but I have a floppy simulator connected with a 6-foot extension cable and it's working fine.

[kvasir]

All the amiga external drives I know of use short cables, but I have a floppy simulator connected with a 6-foot extension cable and it's working fine.

I'm not sure if the difference between an emulated drive, which typically uses SSD cards (No mechanical parts) and an actual drive would make a difference. The only thing I would be careful about is how much voltage drop you're looking at for the motors and such that spin the disk. With an emulator, this shouldn't be an issue at all, if the Amiga(ish) system needs any feedback at all about that, a resistor would do the trick for emulated H/W. But an actual motor-driven might suffer from a voltage drop, perhaps slowing the drum a bit, which wouldn't be to healthy for the data. I have an external A1010 drive on my 1200, I'll have to try it with an extension cord. (Format a floppy, save something to it w/o the extension, power up with the extension and try to read the file back, perhaps hit it with disksalv for more detailed info). My internet connection proved to be more expensive than needed right now (*%#@!$%!!! AT&T), so my postings are rather limited to whenever I'm near a McDonalds with the netbook. (Called local cable company, should be back and running soon) So I'll probably have results withing a week. :-D

[Crom00]

External floppies are fine on Amiga 1000, 1200, 600 (using the A500 power supply or ATX on A500. A600, A1200) . On the A1000 I had the minimegs 2mg SOTS (slap on the side) adapter.

I also had the Dell High Density drive commisioned by Software hut. That unit only operated in HD mode if the internal Floppy was HD.

Most games are not extra floppy aware. Those that are make use of the extra floppies.

Once I got a big box Amiga I only used the extra drives during installations (Video Toaster floppy installs were brutal...)

[DrDekker]

I used to run my A1200 with three external floppy drives having standard cable length (i.e. short) - never had any problems with any of the drives.

[freqmax]

How long where the cable attached to the floppy drive exactly?
One never thought of that when one had one.... doh