KCS Dual HD floppy drive

[Lianna]

I'm not going to translate all of the manual for you, far too much text!

First of all they say the switch can be toggled while the Amiga is on, but changing it probably won't take effect until a reboot.

Upper position: needs no driver, but you only get DD floppy support.

Middle position: you need to load the driver after booting. It says it won't recognize the drive without that driver. It also says it offers additional functionality, after that's been enabled in the software. This offers features such as 960K disks, or compressed disks. You need to use the KCS floppy drive to be able to read these, of course.

Bottom position: this is the diskcopy mode, and the driver won't work (you can't use it as a floppy drive like that). You use the BLITZ! (DF0: to DF2:), CYCLONE (DF0: to DF1:), SIEGFRIED COPY (DF0: to DF1:), or SYNCHRO EXPRESS (DF0: to DF1:) software to copy disks with this mode. They state that the other floppy drive must be empty while doing this. And you can also copy with the switch in the middle position with CYCLONE V, but it won't verify. AMI can be used to copy when booted with the switch in the bottom position, after then switching it to the upper position.

Also, none of these programs can copy a HD floppy.

Hope this is of some use.

[curtis]

Thanks Lianna.

However, I had doped out most of that already from other posts and experimentation.

I was actually feeding the manual through Babel Fish for a while, but it got rather tedious to say the least!

I'm not going to translate all of the manual for you, far too much text!

First of all they say the switch can be toggled while the Amiga is on, but changing it probably won't take effect until a reboot.

Upper position: needs no driver, but you only get DD floppy support.

Middle position: you need to load the driver after booting. It says it won't recognize the drive without that driver. It also says it offers additional functionality, after that's been enabled in the software. This offers features such as 960K disks, or compressed disks. You need to use the KCS floppy drive to be able to read these, of course.

Bottom position: this is the diskcopy mode, and the driver won't work (you can't use it as a floppy drive like that). You use the BLITZ! (DF0: to DF2:), CYCLONE (DF0: to DF1:), SIEGFRIED COPY (DF0: to DF1:), or SYNCHRO EXPRESS (DF0: to DF1:) software to copy disks with this mode. They state that the other floppy drive must be empty while doing this. And you can also copy with the switch in the middle position with CYCLONE V, but it won't verify. AMI can be used to copy when booted with the switch in the bottom position, after then switching it to the upper position.

Also, none of these programs can copy a HD floppy.

Hope this is of some use.

[curtis]

Last comment on this item as I've decided to send it over to ebay.

1.  Compressed mode works!  So, DD compressed yields around 1.8K!  Kind of weird that works given it's almost the same capacity of the HD.  Oh well.

2.  After uninstalling it, ended up re-installing 3.1 because the driver disk overwrote the original format command!  Quite annoying.

So, summary of what I've found out of this little beauty.

After installation of new drives, both drives work as listed below.
HD does NOT work.
DD works perfectly, both 880K and 960K.
PC mode works in DD mode.  HD no.
DD compressed works!

Copy mode has not been tested.

Makes me wonder if the controller inside the case is losing its mind...

Still, a dual drive in a single case is rather handy at times.

[LoadWB]

A guy at our Amiga user group BITD had one of those.  Coolest things I ever saw and I have lusted for one ever since.