Dual Floppy Drives inside a1200t?

[carvedeye]

Hi all i have two floppy drives inside my tower the one i use most is a drive bought from amigakit and is set to as DF0, Now my other drive is the stock drive which i thought was faulty but turned out to be just dirty which is why i bought the other from amigakit who set the drive to df0 for me, so since both drives are fully working i want to be able to use both drives, is there anyway i can use my stock floppy drive as df1 and keep my other drive (the one from amigakit) as df0, obviously i need a double ended floppy cable (of which i have) but i can only use df0 as my other drive does not work both together but both drives do work individually?

TIA

[Matt_H]

The 1200 wasn't intended to take multiple internal floppies. That's why the first drive on the external port is DF1:, whereas on the big-box Amigas it's DF2:.

Micronik made a dual-floppy cable for their 1200 tower kits that would remap DF1: to be an internal drive, but I think there was some circuitry involved. Not going to be easy to find these days.

[danbeaver]

TIA

TIA = transient ischemic attack?

[danbeaver]

Depending on the OS you are using you can map a DF2 to a DF1 (or for that matter an SD0 or RAD) using the DEVS:NSDPatch.cfg program that when processed by SetPatch will setup these associations. I use it to map DF1 to my SD0 and my parallel.device to my lpr.device. I could give more specifics but I'm in bed typing this on my iPhone while a big white cat sits on my chest.

The instructions are listed in NSDPatch.cfg file; it is in text that is parsed into mapping functions.  I know it works in OS 3.9 and 4.1 but I use the other OS so little I don't know about them.  It works so well that other programs never know that the device is being mapped elsewhere.  Example, ADF-Blitz only uses physical drives DF0 to DF3, but my A4000 has only one floppy drive, so I mount a SD0 disk (easier to get rid of than RAD0 and map it as DF1; simply renaming it to DF1 will not work, but the remap does.

[psxphill]

obviously i need a double ended floppy cable (of which i have) but i can only use df0 as my other drive does not work both together but both drives do work individually?

You can't do it without extra hardware
 
http://www.amiga-resistance.info/bboahfaq/index.php?action=artikel&cat=54&id=2293&artlang=en
 
Probably very rare and expensive now, I don't know of anyone making an alternative. It wouldn't be hard though, you should also be able to do it by hacking up an external drive.
 
With two drives connected to the internal header you'll have problems with external drives, unless you patch the motherboard as well.

[Astral]

It is possible...and "simple"...considering your A1200 is towered.

Connect whichever one you want as DF0: to the onboard header.

Get an external drive and remove the electronics to reuse. Plug the electronics into the external floppy connector and re-route it back inside the case and then connect it to the drive you want as DF1:.

Done it myself. Works fine. And being mostly behind the scenes there is no mess.

[danbeaver]

Astral's solution will work; you could pick up a set of 23-pin sockets off *Bay and with ribbon cable make your own cable to floppy drive. You would need to check a schematic of the "pin out" but that is easy to find. The ribbon cables just push onto the connector with the backplate, and I believe it is a one-to-one connection.