The ground pins are there to shield the data lines from electromagnetic interference and crosstalk from neighbouring data lines. It’s a pretty common design for connection systems that use flat ribbon cables and pretty much a necessity if you send digital signals across long ribbon cables. It’s a design pattern that is used to this day.

@PedroAlmeida1974

9 ай бұрын

Beat me to it 😂

@JanBeta

9 ай бұрын

Ah, that makes perfect sense! Thanks for pointing that out! I guess it's not really necessary for the very short cables in the Amiga 500s but I totally see the necessity for longer cables without "external" shielding.

@Numfuddle

9 ай бұрын

@@JanBeta Crosstalk is always an issue even on short cables. For EMI the length plays a role but an unshielded cable basically acts as an antenna and the wire length only determines the wavelength of the signals that are picked up or sent out. Old computers are crammed full of stuff and so you have lots of interference at all kinds of frequencies. Shielded cables were rather expensive especially when they include a lot of wires and separating data lines with grounded wires is a low cost and effective solution to reduce both crosstalk between data lines and also the amount of interference that’s being picked up by the cable.

@thisnthat3530

9 ай бұрын

@@Numfuddle The wavelength of the signals in a floppy cable is around 400m long (traveling at 0.6C). Unless the cable is ridiculously long it's not an issue. I made a 50cm custom cable for the floppy in my PC using a 16 core ribbon cable and it's been working for many years without error.

@SuperVstech

9 ай бұрын

@@thisnthat3530the grounds were likely an fcc requirement

I used to make a little PCB that would go between the drive and cable that would emulate the RDY by delaying the Motor On by about half a second. That made the Amiga copiers work.

@jaycee1980

9 ай бұрын

I've recently done much the same thing :) uses MTR and SEL in my case, used surface mount parts so it fits on a 1.5x2cm pcb :)

14:45 Here's a little trick to bridging those jumpers without any wire. Just turn off your soldering iron and continue to try soldering the bridge while it gradually cools. Solder wants to flow towards the heat and away from the stop mask material. The cooler the iron gets, the more sluggish the solder behaves, until it will rather bridge the gap across the stop mask than flow towards the iron tip.

Good stuff. Quite a simple task. Some older PC disk drives have jumper by their power connectors to change the DS setting.

I really could have used this information in the 1990s when I was looking for an external drive for my A500. My friends told me Amiga drives are not that different from PC drives and they just "needed the drive select changed or something" but no-one seemed to know the exact details.

Only the other day I was thinking not watched one of your videos for some time. Not sure why KZread hasn't been popping them into my feed as a reminder. Great to be watching again as you're always willing to try things and your enthusiasm is obvious. Wish I had more time to do all these things for myself.

Literally I was holding PC FDD in my hands thinking what to do with that when I spotted your new video :) came quite handy. Thank you for sharing this !

Awesome video! I had always wondered about the differences between “vintage” 3.5” drives and “less vintage” PC versions.

Awesome Video! Exactly what i was looking for since ages. I finally understood the conversion process... thanks alot.

perfect timing! I need to do this!

18:35 I very much like the way you cut traces with a Swiss Army knife like MacGyver! 😁

A good stress test would be some demoscene disks with esoteric formatting on them that's pushing the track limit. Great straightforward hack though!

This is why I'm a Patreon. Jan's videos are practical, homemade, and completely feasible for the average computer nerd. Danke Dir! Hast Du super gemacht 🙂.

Thanks Jan for this video! Just want to say that i converted one disk drive model Samsung sfd 321 b and it works nice in my Amiga 1200!

I managed to "convert" a PC drive back in the day by just trying random jumper placements (I didn't know what they did electrically). After that, Id always keep the salvaged PC drives with a full set of jumpers.

Vielen Dank für Ihre Zeit und Mühe, ein enormer Beitrag für die Amiga community

@JanBeta

8 ай бұрын

Ich bin nicht annähernd der erste, der das gemacht hat, gibt jede Menge Informationen im Netz zu diesen Umbauten. Ich habe aber kein in die Tiefe gehendes Video dazu gefunden, also habe ich kurzerhand mal eines gemacht. :)

Nice job! I have converted a couple drives over the years and you found some good ones. If you are lucky you can find some PC drives that have jumpers for everything needed here and all you have to do is move the jumpers to make it work with Amiga. I have a couple of these drives and they are very versatile. Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work.

@jvidia

9 ай бұрын

What models are those?

@Jope9k

9 ай бұрын

@@jvidia some TEAC drives which have a large bank of jumpers can be directly jumpered to be Amiga compatible. These don't pop up very often though.

Ready signal is used for many if not the most Ndos games and demos. Its also practical to block the DD/HD sensor.

I recently modded a Samsung PC Floppy Drive which I pulled from an old Dell SFF PC to work with my A600, I just needed to move a couple of solder blobs & a install a jumper wire, I believe it works but need some Disks to test it with! Anthony - Birmingham/UK 🇬🇧

Nice! I have an Alps PC FDD lying around, I just checked the web page you linked, and it has the mod description for that drive too. I will modify it to be used as an external (DF1) drive for my 500+ which has an internal Gotek. Thank you for the info.

Really interesting.

I enjoyed your video. I have a couple of modified Chinon, drives that were modified using your method. I also have two half height drives that I purchased, that both work as HD drives. I can't determine the brand of the drives, because they have a molded plastic cover. The rubberized case, has a Dell logo, showing they were originally meant as an external drive for a Dell computer. These drives were modified, by modifying the cable only.

All my Amiga and Atari drives have been replaced by PC drives. Atari ST was a bit more complex because of the strange disk change detection. Good DD disks are increasingly hard to find, and new packs are pretty rare. Unlike the old drives, the modified PC drives can write to HD disks as long as the density hole is taped up or the switch is disabled. Never had a problem with modded Samsung SFD321-B drives.

@tnts999998

9 ай бұрын

Whhhhhaaaat? Modified drive in Amiga enables "modern" floppies??? OMG!

@WinrichNaujoks

9 ай бұрын

How do you fit the face plates though? The PC drives dont fit in an Amiga/Atari.

@Shmbler

9 ай бұрын

​@@WinrichNaujoks The drive for the A500 needed a few mm of the top case half cut/folded back in the front to fit. Otherwise, both Amiga and SF314 just needed some ordinary standoffs and 3D printed buttons. The original front bezel of the PC drives has to be removed, of course.

@db_37205

9 ай бұрын

​@@WinrichNaujoksThe Samsung SDF321B drive plate needs to be removed for the A500/1200, and a 3D printed eject button (from Thingiverse) used instead. The top plate needs a little trimming near the front with kitchen scissors for the case top to fit.

Bel lavoro,questo è il modo migliore per avere dei buoni drive AMIGA,e a un buon prezzo

Awesome 🤩👍🏼

Good stuff, this could be very useful if my original Amiga disk drives decide to go to Commodore heaven.

Das is ja cool. Wusste nicht das das so einfach geht.

I bought a bunch of PC Drives, some I converted to Amiga. Because I have PC and Amiga Drives, I have to label the drives as Amiga Converted Drives so I don't gran the wrong drive to be used in a PC which would be mostly at work. Yea I still have some older Robots, other Automation Equipment and Injection Molding Machines require a PC Drive. Honestly the drives in those machines are not worth using due to the debris they collect so having a fresh clean drive is essential plus backing up old floppies is important. Buying disks is important too because you never know when you need a disk and it's not like you can run out and buy them. My company is about to sell off its oldest Machine and Robot and when they leave my factory, I will be the happiest person in the world because it's a major task to restore those machines when they lose their software. Yea you need an old PC running DOS, native serial port and or a working floppy drive.

Great Video! My original 1200 Drive "ist Kaput!" and I replaced it with a Gotek. But I believe all I have to do is replace a few EL caps with some Mouser Ceramic equivalents. I will make every effort to revive it. Tcshuss! 😎

@JanBeta

8 ай бұрын

Caps are definitely an issue with the Amiga drives. In fact, I had to replace a leaky SMD electrolytic cap on my A1200 drive a while back when it suddenly stopped working. Came back to life instantly. Chances are yours has the same issue. I think it's usually a capacitor in the motor control circuit that brings these drives down.

So, it was all along an Amiga floppy in the hardware of an IBM Floppy. And everything that was needed was a good technician that helps the floppy in its transition into the Amiga world. By the way, the Commodore rainbow is the only rainbow I believe in. The pot of gold is never to be found with the natural rainbow.

This is all very well and great. However, I am yet to see a video that shows a way to make the floppy drive's eject button line up with the case of the Amiga (1200) once everything is put back together, in a way it can be conventionally operated.

@SlCKB0Y-sb1kg

9 ай бұрын

Really? Prepare to have your mind blown. If you Google “pc floppy amiga eject button adaptor” you will find many solutions to this problem. 🙄 it’s like magic!!

I have been using these IDE cables in place of magnet wire for years. If you need wire with better insulation they are ideal. So easy to find but not any more.

A really good test of the converted Drive is the Demo Sanity by Arte I believe. If that works then it' is 'Winner, winner Chicken Dinner'! Part 2 by Jan Beta: Disabling HD detection and converting Drive #2 DS by alternate route moving Jumper DS1 to DS0 and running above Demo to end the Video, LOL! Great job BTW. -Mark.

👍👍

I've had weird luck with my amiga 2000. Both floppies worked right off the bat, and after replacing one with a gotek drive I decided to store the other one inside the machine as a spare. Now if only I could find more amigas, they're even harder to find than the floppy drives

I just modified a TEAC drive. From my research it appeared to be one of the easier drives to modify. Paid $20 for it and hope to stick it into my A1000 as that drive has issues reading floppies.

Jan Da Man!

Sehr geil, Grüße von Deutschland nach Germany😁

I am not using a lot of floppies anymore on my Amiga, mainly due to the reliability issues in both drives and disks. My main data storage is a Gotek with a thumb drive and HxC. This has the added benefit of not having to lug around boxes full of disks when going to conventions and the like. It is not like I hate floppies, on the contrary. And I still have the internal disk drive in my Amiga. But I do not want to have to rely on them exclusively. I will probably pick up a few spare drives, just in case.... ;-)

Nice vid thanks Jan! I remember when I got my Escom Amiga Technologies A1200, there was some problems with the compatibility of the drives the used. They did the same thing as here (iirc):- modified PC drives to use in the A1200. But there was a quite a number of games that would not work. Indianapolis 500 being one. I wonder how they cocked it up if it was this easy for them? Just lack of care/testing maybe?

@db_37205

9 ай бұрын

The reversal of both the Escom motherboard alterations and those of the floppy drive in the A1200 is simple, and takes less than 10 minutes.

@Jope9k

9 ай бұрын

They just didn't do it all the way. The drives are unmodified, instead they added a jumper to the motherboard to get diskchange to the right place. It's possible to revert the motherboard modification and modify the drive for real.

@jaycee1980

9 ай бұрын

The problem with the Escom boards is missing DSKRDY signal. The Amiga OS doesnt care about this as it uses a 500ms wait, but many trackloaders in games just wait for DSKRDY to become active - and they will hang if it doesnt

@jan beta. @17:48, I'm wondering if you unbridge the DS1 jumper on the board (It's just below the DS2 Jumper) that will in fact enable Drive Select 0 without having to cut traces.

Most ppl try and find a way to disable the HD detect as well. -Mark

The problem was the Paula IC. This is not only responsible for the sound but also for the interrupts. Unfortunately, this IC only manages DD floppys and HD floppys at half the speed. But at half speed, HD disks become unreliable. Paula is too slow for HD at the right speed. The solution was often to install a standard floppy controller and bypass Paula. But these were then no longer bootable. Then there were circuits that shared a floppy between Paula and an additional floppy controller. Or two floppy drives were installed whereby the DD remained bootable and the second could then handle HD.

@jensschroder8214

9 ай бұрын

The last produced A1200s had modified PC drives and XCopy didn't work.

@jensschroder8214

9 ай бұрын

In Amiga times, HD floppy disks were often used in DD drives. DD disks were harder to come by.

Did I miss the Ready signal finding quest or it was not connected after all? Did you try copying a full disk with nibble copy and low RAM so you'd have to swap disks?

Nice informative video. This might help me reanimating my Amiga. If you need to move the drive select from Pin 12 to pin 10, cant you just bridge pin 12 and 10? I guess since 12 is not used by Amiga, it does not matter that the signal arrives on both, 12 and 10? I imagine that easier than solder a wire on a tiny conductor path

It'd be cool to do one of the projects like PCFloppy2Amiga that add an extra magnet to the flywheel to enable 150rpm on HD disks to make them compatible with Paula.

@mophus6461

9 ай бұрын

Not all drives can hold stady 150rpm since they were pojected for 300.

@NozomuYume

9 ай бұрын

@@mophus6461 Yeah it's a bit of a project to make it work. Requires picking the right drive and/or swapping the flywheel.

@magnustveten492

9 ай бұрын

Is there a link to such a diy project?

@NozomuYume

9 ай бұрын

@@magnustveten492 PCFloppy2Amiga on Aminet, though you might not be able to source the exact floppy drive it uses.

Interesting, I've had so much trouble with original FDD's going out of "alignment" and no longer reading discs. I found procedures to try and correct them but it was easier to get another. Maybe a subject for another video. 🤔

All your drives belong to us! xD

Dont a lot of these mainly Sony drives , works really well,

Will this disk drive work better with HD disks formated as 720 Kb?

Do you thing this will work on a amstrad cpc464 ddi-1 has mine stop working some time ago

@JanBeta

9 ай бұрын

I never owned a DDI-1 so I'm not sure. I think the drives use the Shugart standard as well but I think there are some more modifications needed to make a PC drive behave properly with the CPC.

could you please test giana sisters s.e. on this drive? i own a modified sony drive and use it in my amiga 1200. it works perfect with the only exception that giana sisters s.e. wont boot. regards

I have a external Amiga drive where drive don´t work..I would exchange that,but noticed the the external drive has only a 26 pin connector and no 4 pin power connector and the drive i wanna use has the regular pin amount for Amiga´s and 4 pin power. Do you know how to convert the 26 pins into a regular Amiga drive ?? Ever seen that before ?

I did this for an external drive 😂

I have my X-COPY dongle lying around somewhere 😁

I had to put a small dowel under the head spring to give a little more pressure to get mine working, over time the spring becomes weaker I guess.

@JanBeta

Ай бұрын

Yes, that happens sometimes. I worked on an ancient Matsushita drive that had that problem a while back. Glad you found a workaround. Re-tensioning those springs is not really feasible as far as I know because they are often extremely inaccessible (unless you dismantle the whole mechanism which probably ends with it being destroyed most of the times). 😅

the 5volt for the new drives rather than 12volts might be why the ones I've tried with my amiga 500 stopped working after a few minutes using the internal drive power cable.

@Jope9k

9 ай бұрын

Some old A500s have drive power cables which are easy to plug in upside down. The grey flat cable types are the ones to be very careful with. Also A500 rev5 and older don't have any kind of keying at the motherboard end. Best double check with a multi meter. :-)

Hi Jan, did you receive my email from 27 september, regarding a Commodore calculator?

Hallo Jan. Isn't the enamel isolator of the wire going to melt with the heat of the solder, and thus no need to scratch it and risk breaking it?

@JanBeta

9 ай бұрын

Yes, that's how I usually do it. I just add some solder, leave the soldering iron on the wire for a bit and melt the insulation. That's why it's so convenient to work with this stuff doing these little modifications.

@jaycee1980

9 ай бұрын

Depends on the enamel used on the wire. Usually it's best to scrape it a bit to get it started- the solder flowing onto the bare copper usually does the rest

Is it possible to convert a PC HD floppy to be able to read and format HD disks to 1.44mb on my A4000 or will it only do 880k ?

@JanBeta

8 ай бұрын

Not without a lot more modification unfortunately. I'm doing some research on that currently and it seems you can pull it off with certain Sony PC drives at least, using a GAL chip to accommodate for the changed logic to make the motor run at half speed for high density. Commodore's implementation of HD in the Amigas is one big workaround basically which complicates things significantly. :/

I've modified a few PC FDDs for use with Amigas, only had one which didn't really work well (seemed to have issues writing, but I put that down to the drive being flaky), the rest, no issues really, but I've yet to actually have an original Amiga drive fail as yet, which has probably just jinxed me and all my Amiga drives (both internals and externals) will just die for no reason now... :P

@JanBeta

9 ай бұрын

Hope you didn't jinx it! :D I had quite a few original Amiga drives failing over the years, some of them were recoverable but some were lost causes. Glad that modifying PC drives is not as difficult as I thought.

@twocvbloke

9 ай бұрын

@@JanBeta It's certainly handy being able to modify the drives, some brands even have all the connections available as solder blob pads (versus the 0-Ohm link pads like what you had to deal with there) making conversion even simpler, I think places like Lemon Amiga and EAB have lists of easy-to-mod drives posted, so worth a look to mod some more as spare units... :)

Since I got one of these nice aluminium shell handhelds from china, I find it hard to fire up original hardware :)

Could I use the same drive with this modification in an MSX?

@JanBeta

3 ай бұрын

I am not 100% sure (mostly because I haven't tried) but technically it should be compatible with all systems that require the Shugart standard after the mods. So, yes, the MSX should work. :)

I would love to do that for my A2000, but I guess there are no PC Floppy drives which have the correct measures to fit seamlessly into the A2000 case? The original A2000 drives have 1.5x the height of the normal floppy drives :(

@Jope9k

9 ай бұрын

You could 3d-print one of those gotek a2000 frames that are floating around on the stl sites.

are you going to make hd density copies with the hd disk drive? id like to know how that works out

@db_37205

9 ай бұрын

A piece of cellophane tape

@Jope9k

9 ай бұрын

It will not work, proper Amiga HD drives emit a special ready pulse for the OS to detect high density and most importantly they spin at 150rpm in HD mode, so that Paula can keep up with the double bit rate of HD disks.

? why not change the driver board ?

Can somebody tell me the game of the intro sound of Jan Beta. It is annoying me not to know although it was imprinted in my brain about 35 years ago. Thanks for helping me

@JanBeta

8 ай бұрын

It's from the C64 game "Flip & Flop". :)

@MrRoelie

8 ай бұрын

@@JanBeta Thanks for answering! Love your channel!

Kurze Floppykabel brauchen nicht unbedingt eine Abschirmung, aber schon ab ca. 25 cm Kabellänge nimmt die EINSTREUUNG von Störsignalen schon deutlich zu. Die vielen Groundpins haben also schon ihre Berechtigung bei längeren Floppykabeln. In externen Laufwerken findet man dagegen schonmal nicht geschirmte Kabel mit nur 17 Pins....

How about using HD disks? I have a Amiga 1.76Mb drive in my A3000. Can it be done, seems it should be possible.

@JanBeta

8 ай бұрын

I'm looking into that at the moment. It's not that trivial because you need some additional logic to be able to control the motor speed from the Amiga side (at least as far as I understand so far).

@kjellmesch8060

8 ай бұрын

Dreading the day my A3000 floppy drive dies, finding a replacement will not be easy.@@JanBeta

Will it fit inside the amiga? Maybe a part 2 video please?

@JanBeta

9 ай бұрын

I might do another one where I modify it to fit the Amiga case. Usually the form factor of the PC drives is VERY similar, you might need some taller standoffs in case the drive is a "slimmer" model and you have to modify the eject button though.

@timjewell7492

9 ай бұрын

Yes please, I would love to see a video on how to get the eject button working properly once the Amiga is put back together! @@JanBeta

@peddersoldchap

9 ай бұрын

@@timjewell7492 Maybe with some 3d printing magic? ;)

Wouldn't it be easier to use your Sponsor, PCBway, to make an Adaptor PCB for the drive? :)

Wouldn't it have been easier to adapt the ribbon cable?

@Jope9k

9 ай бұрын

Usually you don't get the ready signal from anywhere without an internal modification to the drive.

So theoretically this should work fine with HD disks and just format them as DD? Or even as double sized 1760k disks?

@MikeyN6IL

9 ай бұрын

No. The magnetic material on HD disks has different properties than DD disks. If you tape over the hole on a HD disk and try to use it as a DD disk it will be unreliable. It may or may not work and if it works it may lose data over time. You really should use DD media for 720/800k and HD media for 1440k.

@Breakfast_of_Champions

9 ай бұрын

@@MikeyN6ILBut this is the appropriate HD head for HD disks. Only the track/sector layout is different from MessDOS?

@JanBeta

9 ай бұрын

Yes, it should. The head is an HD/DD capable head so I don't see why it wouldn't work with both HD and DD floppies. Even most original DD Amiga drives work quite reliably with HD disks in my experience. The Turrican disk I've shown is my usual Amiga test disk, and it's just a standard HD PC disk with the HD hole taped over. :)

@RacerX-

9 ай бұрын

@@Breakfast_of_Champions It will likely work but as stated it may not be reliable even though it is an HD drive. The HD drive can format and read/write to 720k media but it does this by falling back to DD mode. If you stick a HD disk in the drive with taped HD hole it will still put the drive in DD mode and use the appropriate write current, etc to utilize the disk. It was never meant to support 720k format on HD disks. So in the end YMMV but it is, as stated above, safer to use DD disks. I have some HD disks in my collection that were written on Amiga back then and they are still working but I also have some that are not. Of course I have DD disks that have failed left and right too so it is not a hard and fast rule.

@anakondase

9 ай бұрын

@@RacerX- The problem with HD drives for the Amiga is that they run at half speed. These drives probably can't do that so using HD disks to get 1.76 MB won't work.

ARE YOU GOING TO TEACH US HOW TO MOD THIS DRIVE 😊😊😊

I've never seen any new internal ones. I've only seen newly made external USB versions.

@JanBeta

9 ай бұрын

You may be correct. I've only seen USB ones lately, too. In any case, used classic internal PC drives are still widely available thankfully.

Most PC drives will read only 80 tracks, this may be a problem on Atari ST or Amiga.

The question now is, can you cover the hole with tape and format an originally HD (1.44MB) floppy as a DD (720K) by using a modified drive like this? I know that original Amiga DD drives cannot format an HD floppy as DD by just covering the hole because of the magnetic flux difference between HD and DD diskettes, but if the drive is actually made for HD diskettes, then maybe it can be possible now. This would be something really awesome because HD floppies are still much easier and cheaper to get than DD ones.

@jaycee1980

9 ай бұрын

You can just bridge the HD detect switch in the drive, and it will always be in DD mode

@borayurt66

9 ай бұрын

@@jaycee1980 Yes, better than taping the hole. But, will it format HD disks as DD? I have a box full of them that I absolutely have no use for. I would love to use them on the A500+

@lenm2857

9 ай бұрын

I know that is supposed to be a problem, but half my disks back in the 90's were HD and I never had an issue.

@borayurt66

9 ай бұрын

@@lenm2857 I know from first hand experience that you cannot format a HD floppy as a DD in the original DD drive. But never tried this with a modified HD drive.

@Jope9k

9 ай бұрын

Just try it and see. Maybe it will write ok. You do have to tape the HD detect hole to read/write DD bitrates though, else the drive's filters will ruin your fun. One trick is to also wipe the HD disk down with with a neodymium magnet before attempting to format it as DD, but this might be snake oil.

Would love to see someone convert a Mac 2MB sony floppy drive to an Amiga. This way we could get 1.76MB out of it. :)

@jaycee1980

9 ай бұрын

Not likely. The reason the Amiga doesnt support high density drives is because Paula cannot handle the faster data rate.

@andrewenglish3810

9 ай бұрын

@@jaycee1980 That's not true, Amiga does support 1.76MB high density. Chris Edwards already did a video on this demostrating this, and I think some of the A4000's came with HD floppies if I remember.

@andrewenglish3810

9 ай бұрын

@@jaycee1980 Here you go, the A3000 came with high density floppy drives, Chris shows they work fine on the A2000. kzread.info/dash/bejne/dYqB1paiY6WzkrA.htmlsi=6TbIGAfzQ8uIkvk7

@jaycee1980

9 ай бұрын

​@@andrewenglish3810It supports them with a non standard drive that spins at half the speed, so halves the data rate. It's a hack really, and the HD drives that do it are quite hard to get hold of. A standard PC high density drive cannot be used, at least not directly.

Did I miss something or did he not show a test of writing to the floppy? That would be my question. You have shown reading, it's now time to see writing.

someone should make some adapters for this drive solutions :) you ^ commenter there, it's your turn!

@UberAlphaSirus

9 ай бұрын

I think they do already

@Jope9k

9 ай бұрын

You can buy some from Ian Stedman

You are not done by far, yet... the real work just starts now: constructing an printing a fitting bezel and button, finding the correct colored PLA or resin, ... or do you want to motivate your viewers to destroy their Amiga cases?

@JanBeta

9 ай бұрын

I don't think you would need a bezel to fit this drive in an A500, just some properly sized standoffs. The button is the trickier part, especially since I don't have a 3d printer. :D There might be another video eventually...