Floppy expander?

[Brian]

A friend of my got this Elbox PowerTower (A1200) system and in it was some sort of small card sitting on the floppyconnector that the floppycable was then attached to. The Amiga floppy work great without this hardware but when it's connected it doesn't so this pritty much ruled out being a buffer to support longer floppycable in the tower. I then thought it might be something to support PC drives in the tower but this proved not to be the case either. Last thing I can think of is that it make the A1200 support Amiga HD diskdrives but I have no way of testing this and if it was so shouldn't a Amiga DD diskdrive work with it aswell? I can't find it on either of the two big Amiga hardware databases so I'm at a loss here.

So now I ask you out there.. do you know what it is and how it's suppose to work?

[Homer]

It does sound like the Eyetech EZ-DF0. That allowed PC drives to be plugged on to the standard floppy interface, but only works if it is plugged on the right way. Have a very close look at it to see if it is marked to show which way it should go. Oh, yea, I did plug mine the wrong way first and it didn't work until I turned it around ;-)
Otherwise, send a photo and I'm sure someone will be able to identify it :-)

[Linchpin]

Is it not the Escom a1200 FDD adaptor for use with those Panasonic drives (After they ran out of proper amiga ones)??

Excuse the bad ascii drawing, but its kinda like this


    ______  <- floppy goes in here
    |
____|_____  <- a1200 mobo (FDD socket)

[Brian]

Could be any of the two but I think it's the latter since the card doesn't fit in the wrong way around and the cable was tested both ways with the PC drive we had to make sure it wasn't that which made the drive not work.

So what you say is tha the Escom adaptor only work with Panasonic PC HD diskdrives? That might explain why it didn't work with the PC diskdrive of another brand that we tried it with.

[Linchpin]

Becouse the Panasonic drives were "hacked" to slow them down when escom ran out of the drives. Does it say "Amiga Technologies" on it?

[Linchpin]

This is one from an A4000T, but i *think* they look the same.

[Karlos]

I used to get a dozen spam emails a day advertising floppy expansion hardware...

Oh, wait. I think that might have been something else :lol:

[Brian]

That picture show exactly what we got here.

[Linchpin]

Ok. Basically that small PCB converts the Amiga drive signals so that they can be used with a non - amiga specific drive. However, you cannot just hook up a normal PC drive. The only type of drive that fits on that PCB is the type of drive in the Escom amiga's (when they had no more Chinon / Proper amiga drives) left in stock, but were still producing Amiga's. They work ok for about 99% of amiga software, but your best option is to remove it and the Panasonic drive, and connect an Amiga 500 drive direct onto the a1200 motherboard.

Hope that helps!

Kevin

[Brian]

Heh... useless hardware then... it's not in use as we have a real Amiga drive with the tower instead.

[Linchpin]

Indeed. I am still using one of those in my a1200T due to the Panasonic drive, but i have DF0 and DF1 so if it gives me any crap i can use the Cumana drive.

I have an a500 chinon drive to go in ASAP but i am trying to get this Sony drive to work also :-(