Amiga 1200 Disk Drive strange behaviour!

[gaula92]

Hello all!

In the first place, nice to meet you guys! It's my firs post here. But I hope I can help others and be helped by you!

Well, I have this Amiga 1200 I'm building myself: I got an ESCOM motherboard from Vesalia, along with an "A1200 floppy drive". I also bought an standard PC floppy cable.
The problem is that the disk drive works PARTIALLY: I can boot WB 3.1 from floppy with my original disks, but once WB has started, it won't recognice a disk change! It doesn't even try to read a new disk or mount it: it expects the same disk I booted with to be in the drive.

I know ESCOM motherboards are suppossed to be PC-drive compatible, but I didn't know they had problems with drives manufactured for Commodore motherboards...
So what's the solution for using my "commodore standard floppy drive" with this ESCOM motherboard? I wouldn't like to solder on the MB to disable ESCOM's hack: is there any way I can use this disk drive with a floppy cable with crossed rdy signal? (Amigakit seems to sell this cable, and I'm about to buy some other amiga material, so..)

Thanks!!

[orange]

simple, swap the wire to diskchange signal. you will still need RDY for games etc.., look on aminet for solutions or in aorg album.

link1
link2

[gaula92]

thanks for the info, orange! Do you think that I've to swap that signal only? will it be enough? The disk drive doesn't try to read a new disk when I extract the WB one after booting, so maybe more signals must be changed...
moreover, those signal swap schematics are for Commodore motherboards so they can use PC floppy drives (well, for floppy buses connected to C= motherboards)... What if I get a PC floppy for my ESCOM motherboard? shouldn't it just work fine? After all, those ESCOM mb are modified to use PC drives...I am still very confused...

Thanks!

[rkauer]

gaula92 wrote:
thanks for the info, orange! Do you think that I've to swap that signal only? will it be enough? The disk drive doesn't try to read a new disk when I extract the WB one after booting, so maybe more signals must be changed...
moreover, those signal swap schematics are for Commodore motherboards so they can use PC floppy drives (well, for floppy buses connected to C= motherboards)... What if I get a PC floppy for my ESCOM motherboard? shouldn't it just work fine? After all, those ESCOM mb are modified to use PC drives...I am still very confused...

Thanks!

 No need to be confused. The motherboard from Escom is barely a revision of C= versions. You can use any Amiga hardware on it.

[orange]

@gaula92
yes, thats correct, I think. so you need to do reverse from schematics, or just get a cheap PC floppy drive.
look here

@rkauer
the problem here is that, IIRC, ESCOM internal FDD connector on motherboard doesn't have RDY signal! (and diskchange is moved) I think he would need to 'feed' RDY on DF1: connector.

[gaula92]

ok guys, so I THINK I have understood the problem an came with a possible solution. I have decided to USE A PC FLOPPY DRIVE with the ESCOM mb, so here are my ideas: please correct me if you think that I'm wrong...I am not very good at soldering! (or english speaking, as you can see )

-SIGNAL DCD (disk change) DOESN'T NEED to be changed: it's already changed in the ESCOM mb. Leave it as is.

-SIGNAL DS0 crossed with SIGNAL DRVSB in the schematics COMES ALREADY CROSSED IN ESCOM motherboards: I must leave it as as.

-SIGNAL DS1 crossed with SIGNAL MOTEA in the sthematics COMES ALREADY CROSSED IN ESCOM motherboards: I must leave it as as.

And EVEN IF IT'S CORRECT (it would mean I just need to connect a PC drive to the ESCOM MB and no modifications are needed at all: it would work well except for old NDOS disks wich rely on RDY, wich I don't use: I have mi A500 for that), it leaves me with a couple of questions:

-Can I really live without RDY signal? To what extend?
-All info I've seen about this topic seems to point out that ESCOM Amigas use MODIFIED PC DRIVES: ok, but what modifications are those?? only external modifications so it will fit in a standard AMIGA case? I mean: if you must cross DS0 and DS1 with other signals to use PC drives in COMMODORE AMIGAS (again in schematics), then it should be already crossed in ESCOM ones...
Or... ARE ESCOM floppy drives in DS1 mode by jumper selection and I must cross those DS0 and DS1 signals to use an off-the-shelf pc disk drive with an ESCOM machine?
 
I am ABOUT to get it once and for all...!
thanks guys!

[orange]

AFAIK, workbench 2+ will work fine without the RDY, software like X-Copy, D-Copy, DMS won't

[Piru]

Addidionally, some trackloading demos and games won't load properly without RDY signal.