Obsolete technology?

[Ral-Clan]

Oh, I see.  I thought you were saying that the Shugart interface wasn't compatible with the Amiga or something.

Internal installation looks rather simple, in my opinion.  Rig up a few simple to make power and drive cables and install.

But I guess if you don't like tinkering with wires, etc, even with basic stuff like this, it could be a turn-off.

I'm sure that the drive could be made to work externally.  The external disk drive port on the Amiga is probably some simple variation of the Shugart interface over DB25, plus some extra lines for power....and maybe a simple circuit to identify the drive as DF1:

If you could figure that out you could probably make a cable that would allow this device to work externally.

[ChaosLord]

There is the HXC floppy. I'm not sure if that is what you are talking about though. Its kinda expensive... Might be cheaper to get a IDE/RAM expansion and just use whdload.

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/

i ordered one but have not tried it yet.... looks cool

I am thinking of getting 1 or 2.  Do u know if the model F cased version fits into a DF0: Floppy Drive Bay of an A3000?

[ChaosLord]

I thought I'd already explained. I know how to plug in an external floppy drive, but I don't know how to fit this device internally. Here's a blog entry about how to do it

http://www.amigalog.com/installing-the-hxc-floppy-emulator/

I don't feel that I could do that or should have to.

I read the blog entry and its way to hard for me to do that stuff to an A500.  I'm a lamer.  I would hafta hire someone to do that stuff for me.

Does anyone know if it is 128x simpler to put one of these Hxc floppy emulators in an A3000 DF0: Drive bay?  Or DF1: Drive bay if the A3000 has such a thing?
It seems like it should just plug right in and be super easy.

I have 2 A3000s with broken DF0:'s.  This would give me a floppy emulator and fix my broken A3000s at the same time!

[ChaosLord]

I've actually got one of these floppy emulator devices for the Atari 8 bit computer range, which just plugs in externally. The Atari 8 bit is the big or little brother of the Amiga, because Jay Miner worked on both of them and various concepts are similar. The plug is a special Atari SIO plug. If I could buy or make an adapter for the Amiga parallel or serial ports, then I may be able to use the same device with the Amiga, but with a different SD card.

If you connect it externally then it won't work very well.

The Amiga only boots up DF0: not DF1:

If you connect it externally then it becomes DF1: (or DF2: or DF3:) so it wouldn't autoboot and would lose a lot of its usefullness.

There is a  way in software to switch around the DF0: to the external drive.  But the HxC makers would have to figure out how to incorporate it into their software.  Which come to think of it they should do.  Then they could sell a purely external version for all us Amiga Lamers(tm)

[AmigaBruno]

Oh well, never mind. I've bought an electronic projects starter kit from eBay, including a breadboard. This means I'll start to build circuits within seconds, then in the near future I can probably build a SCSI connector out of one or two breadboards, then download a ROM file for the controller and burn it onto an EPROM and that will be all I need to do to connect a SCSI hard drive!

[ChaosLord]

Another "problem" of the HxC is that it perfectly emulates a floppy drive.  It emulates it so perfectly that it emulates the speed too, apparently.  I read a bunch about it but never saw any mention of a turbo mode.  Darn.

I will probably still buy an HxC anway, just in case.

[freqmax]

The floppy controller on Amiga can't handle PC 1.44MB drives that are 2x speed. So no turbo mode..

SCSI = Turbo