Epic Amiga battle on osnews.com Extra Floppy vs No Extra Floppy!

[slaapliedje]

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

[Matt_H]

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.

[hooligan]

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.

[runequester]

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.

[Buzzfuzz]

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.

[prowler]

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.

[kedawa]

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.

[LoadWB]

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.

[takemehomegrandma]

External floppy drives were extremely common where I lived, everyone had at least one extra, many had 2.

[Brian]

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.

[hooverphonique]

I've had A500, A2000, A1200 and currently A4000.. Never had any external floppy drive(s) ;-)

[save2600]

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:

[Frags]

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.

[specialK]

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.

[Jiffy]

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.. :-)