Atari STm

[English Invader]

I bought an Atari 520 STm with a 1MB upgrade yesterday and was thinking about the possibility of building an adaptor to connect an external floppy drive cable to an external-internal floppy interface and using that to run a Gotek HxC floppy emulator.

 

I have zero experience of soldering or hardware building but I don't see any reason why this couldn't work and my guess is that the reason why it hasn't already been done is that there isn't enough interest in the original ST models to make it happen. The only obstacle I can think of is that the power brick might be insufficient to power the adaptor as it wasn't designed to power any external peripherals but I was thinking that could be remedied with a USB phone charger like the UltraSatan.

 

What do you guys think? And please don't encourage me to upgrade to an STe because I already have one (1.62, 4MB + UltraSatan). I bought the STm because I want to explore the original hardware.

[EzdineG]

I am interested In hearing more about your idea. I too have a 520STm, but with a 2MB memory expansion. For the moment my Gotek is sitting inside an SF314 case. The circuitry from the 314 is a bit too large to attempt internalizing.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

I bought an Atari 520 STm with a 1MB upgrade yesterday and was thinking about the possibility of building an adaptor to connect an external floppy drive cable to an external-internal floppy interface and using that to run a Gotek HxC floppy emulator.

It is not clear what exactly you want, additionally you make confusion with that "external-internal floppy interface" and "Gotek HxC floppy emulator.".

I don't know about Gotek, but HxC goes on regular floppy connector, so there is practically no need to build interface. But you possibly meant to keep your external floppy drive, I guess. Then best solution is to make them switchable - both can be A or B (exclusively). That's still not hard, just should get some floppy cable with connector(s), cut off one and soldering wires to proper points according to pin layout.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/211924-old-atari-sf354-hxc-floppy-emulator/

You will need double alternate switch for swappable A-B.