DF0 Selector on Amiga 500

Following on from my initial work on my newly received Amiga 500, I decided to install a DF0 selector, which enables me to select to boot DF0 from the internal floppy drive or boot DF0 from an external floppy drive, even under Kickstart 1.3!

The main benefit of doing this is so that you can boot a Gotek floppy drive emulator as DF0 without having to hack up the case to fit it internally!

So with this device installed you can boot demos and games ADF's from the Gotek connected to the external floppy drive port as if it was connected to the internal floppy cable. Very cool. Means it is easy to switch my Gotek to whatever Amiga requires it.

I picked up the DF0 Selector from Amigastore.eu a while ago, in preparation to doing this on the Amiga 1000, but since the Amiga 500 is here I thought I would set it up on that instead!

Here is the DF0 selector as delivered:

To do this installation, we need to remove the Even CIA chip from the Amiga 500 motherboard - here it is, shown just below the internal floppy drive cable connection:

Here is the chip safely removed:

Paying careful attention to the chip orientation, I place the even CIA chip on the DF0 selector socket connection as below:

I then install the DF0 selector back onto the Even CIA socket:

As a temporary measure I route the selector switch out through the left hand side expansion gap (same as I did for the Indivision ECS):

Close up view of the switch - flick the switch one way for DF0 to be the internal floppy drive, the other position for DF0 to be the external floppy drive (Gotek in my case).

Here is the Gotek - I also picked up a Gotek floppy drive connector (including power) from amigastore.eu to neatly power the Gotek without the need of extra power supplies, etc. The power comes from the external floppy drive connector, as it used to do for the real external floppy drives back in the day!

Close ups of the new gotek floppy connector:

With the Gotek connected to the external floppy drive port and selected as DF0 using the DF0 selector I then fired up the Amiga 500.

I confirmed it booted the Gotek fine as DF0 straight into the selector.adf.

Now for the real test - some tracks demos which are hard coded to only accept DF0 - Scoopex's Mental Hangover demo is a nice choice that works with the 512k we have on this Amiga 500 - one of my favourite demo soundtracks too. It works!

I put the Amiga 500 case back on and pleased to say everything still works:

One thing that has been bugging me is the lack of memory - only having 512k memory limits what games and demos I can try out. But thanks to the ACA500 help is at hand!

When the ACA500 is connected, on booting the A500 the configuration menu appears to load the 3.1 or 1.3 configurations for cf card booting a hard disk. However, you can also choose to boot fast ram or chip ram enabled 1.3 configurations:

If I choose F4 to boot Fast RAM enabled 1.3 configuration, the system now have 2MB memory available! I booted up the Workbench 1.3 ADF from the Gotek to check this:

Fantastic:

So now I can boot up 1MB plus demos on the A500 using the Gotek ADF's (or real floppies if I desire). This is Scoopex's Millennium demo from 2000 running from the Gotek via ADF as DF0 using the DF0 Selector:

I also tried out Ghostown and Whelpz's Sunglasses At Night, the final version demo from 2015 too - great stuff:

I am happy with this setup now on the Amiga 500!

Well, err, I might do some more with it - tempted to try the MAS MP3 Player hardware on it - Mp3's on an Amiga 500, hmmm, tempting to try it. If I can get a bit more memory and an A1200 accelerator to connect to the ACA500 I could try the Subway USB support too - ahh, so many things to muck around with on Amiga's in 2016!

Reached the end of the weekend and I now have a nicely running Amiga 500 I didn't expect to even have before it! Life is interesting for sure! :-)

Gotek using External floppy cable on CDTV

Interesting thing I bought recently on Ebay is a external Amiga floppy disk connector plus cable with integrated floppy drive power supply that can be used to connect a Gotek floppy drive emulator to an Amiga!

For those with Classic Amigas with Workbench 2.0 and above, this is excellent as it means you don't have to open your case up to install the Gotek - it simply plugs into the external floppy drive port and choose to boot from this device in the Early startup menu.

I previously showed the Gotek hooked up to my Amiga 600 and Amiga 1000 using the internal floppy drive connector - opening the case and going into some detail on the operation of the Gotek so I won't repeat myself again here - click the Amiga 600 and Amiga 1000 links for more info!

But today, I am using the external connector on the CDTV to use the Gotek! This is because, unique to the CDTV, the external floppy drive IS DF0 and bootable on Workbench 1.3 without modification internally!

Here is the Gotek drive with USB attached, and the external floppy cable with power:

 

This is my standard CDTV, connected via AV to a TV screen (looks like a computer monitor I know but it is actually a TV with a tuner in it and remote control):

Here is the Gotek all connected up, ready to plug into the floppy connector on the CDTV - I love the simplicity and the fact a separate power source is not needed for the Gotek with this setup. Just plug in and go:

Here is the Gotek now plugged into the CDTV:

 
First power on and we boot into a Classic Amiga game - Katakis:

It works fantastic - I recommend picking up the external connector if you have a Gotek drive. I assume it will work well with a HxC floppy drive too, but not tested.

Since I had the CDTV on, I couldn't resist loading up the Psygnosis Commodore Demo CD - very cool:

Unless you have a CDTV or emulate one, chances are you missed out on this rather interesting CDTV only CD - there are a few that were only released on CDTV:

I plan to bring the CDTV and Gotek setup as above to the Adelaide Amiga 30 meeting on Monday night, so if you are in Adelaide please come along to the meeting and you can see it in the flesh and try it out yourself!

Gotek Floppy Drive Emulator in Amiga 600

I read on various Amiga forums about a rival floppy drive emulator for the HxC floppy, called the Gotek floppy drive emulator. It is in reality a Cortex board, but flashed with the right firmware it can be used as a cheap Amiga floppy drive emulator on the Amiga 600 - I found a seller on Ebay selling a pre-flashed Gotek Amiga package with accessories and quickly bought it!

And here it is - Included with the Gotek package (as above) is the Gotek board mounted in a floppy drive sized plastic case (with controls, USB port and display mounted at one end), 8GB USB flash drive, engraved with the Amiga logo,  DVD with goodies, Instructions, USB flashing tool and cable for upgrading the Gotek firmware from a Windows PC and some jumpers and mounting screws.

It was very cheap compared to the HxC, only AUD$60. But keep in mind it does less too (more on that later).

Here is a closer look at the display end of the gotek floppy drive - you can see the 3 digit display, USB port, two black buttons and a green light:

Looking at the other end we can see the power connector and floppy drive cable connector:

The case is designed to be the same size as the floppy drive you are expected to remove to install this into your Amiga case.

It also has screw holes in the right places for the mounting points into the Amiga 600.

However, when I put the case on I found the first problem - you cannot see the display well, and the buttons are covered by the original case:

After looking online I noted that many people bought the longer floppy and power cables to mount outside, or simply cut the bottom part of the floppy drive section of the Amiga 600 case covering the ports and display so they could use it there - I don't want to do this and at this stage just wanted to try it out - so I put my original floppy drive back in, and connected the Gotek externally using the internal floppy and internal power cables as below:

I also removed the CF drive - reading the instructions the Gotek loads a SELECTOR.ADF from the USB stick, which you then program ADF files to the number slots selectable on the Gotek. Sounds fiddly, and hard to navigate when booting - to prevent HD damage from multiple resets I expect, I took it out first:

I then copied some ADF files to the 8GB USB drive supplied. It is important not to delete the SELECTOR.ADF file, as the Gotek uses this file when booting:

With the setup in place, I then connected everything and powered on - USB drive glows, the green light and the 3 digit display comes on:

Soon after I see the SELECTOR.ADF booted into it's menu screen:

It scans the USB drive and shows all the ADF's. In my case I put a bunch of Classic Amiga demos on it. Use the up and down arrow keys to select an ADF, then choose which SLOT number to assign it to:

The slot number assigned matches up to the 3 digit number displayed on the Gotek case. You can mount up to 999 ADF files with the Gotek.

Don't forget to select the Save and Restart option at the top when you have finished this task (otherwise it doesn't save the work you did!):

On reboot, use the two buttons on the gotek unit to select the Unit number that corresponds to the ADF file you want to boot. Having no Hard disk is good here because doing the going up SLOTS is tedious and slow unless the disk you want is within the first ten or so SLOTS:

Here is the Anarchy Digital Innovation demo ADF loaded via the Gotek Emulator - speed is the same as for the original floppy disk:

SLOT 2 selected and another reboot brings up the Andromeda Sequential demo from 1994:

Crusaders Micro Concept demo was a few more SLOTS along:

You can press down both buttons on the Gotek to quickly change the display to 000 to boot the SELECTOR.ADF again.

It does work well, but unfortunately it doesn't suit my needs really. I think this device is really intended to 100% replace an Amiga floppy drive on an unexpanded Amiga 500/600/1200.

The biggest problem for me is that although it is designed to mount into the floppy drive space on the Amiga, the external interfaces on it do not line up on the Amiga 600, requiring you to alter the case to make it fit - this was disappointing as I am not keen to do this. The attraction of the Gotek over the HxC is that I was hoping not to have to modify the case. Perhaps on an Amiga 500 it does line up better...

I should mention I have seen an external floppy drive mounting kit which I assume means the Gotek can be made to boot from the external drive if you run an Amiga with Workbench 3.0+ ROMS. This would avoid hacking up the original case. However, many games expect to be DF0 and will not work in this configuration, limiting it's usefulness.

The ACA630 accelerator in the Amiga 600 allows me to reconfigure the floppy drive assigns so that DF1 is actually DF0 in hardware, which bypasses this problem above!

The Gotek does not support IPF files, which means it cannot replace protected floppy disks (games, mostly). For me, this means it cannot be a true floppy drive replacement - you still need the floppy drive to boot protected floppies in your collection. For people without a large collection of original game floppy disks this would not be an issue - I bought most of my games so it is for me.

Perhaps this IPF support will come in time.

On the other side of the fence, the HxC floppy drive emulator supports ADF and IPF files amongst others, and has a nicer application to select files and mount them/reboot too - it also has a nice big display to show the active ADF to make switching ADF's easier without the selector application. However, installing it as a floppy drive replacement also involves modifying the Amiga case.

Going back to the Gotek - Changing SLOTS is fiddly and slow - the selector application requires you to take a photo of the screen showing what ADF you assigned to which SLOT as you have zero chance of remembering this later on when selected the SLOTS using the buttons - there is no other display.

This also means you are likely to need to modify the SLOT list often to keep the number of active ADF files low, so that you don't have to press the button so many times....this also means taking photos regularly when you change it..and don't forgot to Save before rebooting from the SELECTOR.ADF each time!

Multiple floppy disks being changed is also a little bit fiddly due to the digit display location, and important to assign the multiple disks to sequential SLOT numbers to avoid slowness switching disks.

I will gloss over the DVD filled with "all the ADF's and DMS files you will ever need" included with the package - do with this what you will. Not totally convinced the seller has a license to use the Amiga name and logo, or permission for the re-flashing of the Gotek for Amiga support either, but maybe the seller does - I'll give them the benefit of the doubt here.

It sounds like I am being a bit harsh on the Gotek, but in summary it is a workable solution for booting ADF files on a real Amiga, with some caveats. I am grateful to have the Gotek flashed with the Amiga floppy firmware with everything you need to plug it in and get started, and the price is certainly attractive.

I do prefer the HxC though, and I will show the HxC on another occasion (I have one of these too) as I work through my Amiga 600 upgrade work.

I first wanted to see what the Gotek was all about since I only found out about it recently. The price of the Gotek is initially attractive, but keep in mind the restrictions I mention above. If these are not an issue for you, then go for it!