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Thinking about using a gotek.


howerton

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That all depends. ;-)

If you already have an Amiga external floppy drive, you can swap out the external floppy mech with a Gotek (with firmware like Flashfloppy) and it will work just like an Amiga external drive.

 

If you don't have an existing Amiga external, you will need to buy/make a cable for it...

 

Easy...

As long as you don't want to boot off of it...

 

If you want to be able to make it your boot floppy (and many many games will really only run from the boot floppy (DF0)), then it is more than a bit more complicated...

You need to be able to swap it..

You can buy adapters or make them.

Here's a vid (I haven't watched, but I have seen some of his other vids and they are generally good) that I think covers it..

 

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I got my cable from amibay and my boot selector from sordan.

 

Very happy with both!

 

The cable from amibay is longer so that you can put the gotek on the side instead of on the top of the Amiga. 

 

Amibay cable

 

Sordan Boot Selector

 

I have the older Cortex firmware which works fine but needs a little messing around. And more often than not you can not save/load.

 

As I understand, if you get the newer flash floppy firmware all you have to do is put the adf:s on the USB stick and it will work. And it has full save/load support. 

 

D1402312-F2BC-45D8-A0AB-1C5E47CC82DE.jpeg

Edited by NumbThumb
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On 1/7/2021 at 6:02 PM, howerton said:

Seems a bit too complicated. Thanks though. As I am new to the Amiga everybody here has been very helpful on this topic and other topics I have posted. Thanks again.

 

Really isn't complicated at all. 

 

Since you want to keep your current floppy drive, you're just plugging the Gotek in the floppy disk connector on the back of the Amiga as you would any other second floppy.

 

The switch @NumbThumb linked you just allows you to then use the Gotek as your primary boot drive instead of the internal floppy.  It's not required, but without out it, you would have to boot up of a real floppy and only use the Gotek as DF1.  Most commercial games need to be booted off DF0 so obviously that would present a problem.

 

The switch adapter installs into a socketed IC.  No soldering required.  Its relatively easy to carefully remove it, install the adapter, and then insert the chip you just removed into the adapter itself.  Route the cable out the back of the Amiga and you are done.  If you prefer, you can drill a small hole on the back of the machine to mount the switch.  

 

Now you can boot off the Gotek.  There's a really handy menu disk that you can use to select which disk images you want to load, then you press F10, and the Amiga reboots and loads whatever you selected.   Alternatively you can use the buttons on the Gotek itself to step through the list of ADF images, although once you have downloaded a bunch, that gets tedious.

 

This is probably the easiest way to run Amiga software you download off the internet.

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I was going to chime in on this, but it looks like oracle_jedi has already pretty much said what I was going to say :)

 

Yeah, its not difficult or complicated. But you do have to do some work and invest some time to have good things. And a Gotek for the Amiga is certainly a good and useful thing. There are other much better (and more expensive) things, but this is the most cost effective way to start enjoying digital media (ripped disks) on any Amiga. It's worth the effort.

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