On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Anders Carlsson <anders.carlsson@sfks.se> wrote: > Scott wrote: > >> Also, the disk drive continually runs or clicks That's "normal" - the machine is stepping the drive to set/reset the /DSKCHG signal when the user changes media (something that DOS PCs don't do and don't know about). There were a number of "no click" hacks back in the day (which IIRC relied on the drive not stepping below track zero, so the internal drive electronics still checked the media-inserted switches but didn't actually move the heads). > You should be aware that Amiga floppy drives tend to be the first item > to break. There are a lot of Amigas out there which work except for the > built-in floppy drive. The mechanism is the same Chinon F?-354 type as > found in e.g. Atari ST and some other computers. Supposedly the way the > Amiga accesses the floppy drive would shorten its life. I've owned a lot of Amigas over the years and I don't recall a higher floppy drive mortality rate than PC or Mac hardware of the same era, but perhaps so few Amiga 500s had hard drives that they simply racked up more hours on the floppy drives than other types of machines and the drives wore out. There's nothing intrinsically "wrong" with the way Amigas access the floppy drive (they achieve greater storage density by writing out whole tracks at a time vs writing out individual sectors one by one, so they can skimp on the inter-sector gaps enough to add up to a couple more sectors per track). > The fact that the drive reads for a few seconds then fails tells me you > might as well try to get another drive as another floppy disk. In theory > I think a standard PC drive would work after a few modifications, mainly > emulating the disk change signal but I never went through with doing it > myself. http://dliapp.wizhut.com/blog/?p=59 http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbl/4068073847/ -ethan Message was sent through the cbm-hackers mailing listReceived on 2011-05-02 23:00:12
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