User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Oct 15, 2016 5:03 pm

I like to move a lot of my games, many of which I own on disk, over to my compact flash 4GB HDD. That way my original disks can stay in their boxes and go into storage. Plus, it's way faster to play games off the HDD (duh). But some games, especially the early ones that came out before 1989, didn't come with hard drive installation options. Every now and then you may find one, but a lot didn't.

The good news is that the vast majority of really early games were only on a single disk. Games that had really large stacks of disks were more of an anomaly found during the birth of the CD-ROM days, when publishers still wanted to cater to the Amiga with the understanding that most users only had floppy drives.

When it came to RPGs, games with a single disk (e.g. Bard's Tale) always needed a second disk for saving character data. Long story short, I love Bard's Tale and playing it on disk is 1/2 of the experience. But damn, the disk swapping can be a real drag sometimes. So, I plunked down and got an original Commodore Amiga external floppy.

The thing looks like an Apple drive, to be honest, with its large front enclosure and rainbow logo. The drive's sound is something to behold, too. It's far quieter and deeper, if that makes sense, than the side-loading df0. The drive was well cleaned and oiled (frankly, too well-oiled). The first blank I put in there came out with some mineral oil on the blue plastic I had to wipe away.

In a case like Bard's Tale, the game can now load in df0, and seek the character data in df1, as smooth as silk. It's a bit silly, but I love this setup for my RPGs now. When you go to Workbench and have no disks inserted, it's kind of hilarious listening to the two drives sing in chorus (in stereo!) every other second, as Amiga drives do when they are perpetually seeking an inserted floppy.

Totally nerdy, but I love it! It's freaking awesome. Check out the setup below.
Attachments
AmigaLogo.jpg
Front face of the drive with the rainbow Amiga logo. It still has the original protective plastic.

sideVieqw.jpg
The new drive is in very good condition with little yellowing.

2drives.jpg
The perfect combo.

redLight.jpg
Hal is ready for data, Dave.

bardsTale.jpg
Bard's Tale in action with 2 floppy drives - no more disk swapping!

system.jpg
My new setup.


User avatar
AMIGA600

Posted Fri Oct 21, 2016 10:15 pm

Holy WTF... I have a external floppy too.. I really need to brave up and put the pieces toegether.

Gimme some motivation! and that is one of my fav games, I constantly think of that game. why are we so alike XD

User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Thu Nov 17, 2016 11:09 pm

That drive is clean. Nice. Sadly I no longer have my Amiga 1010 drive.

I recently purchased a new external floppy drive, the Sakura external. Works like a charm: http://sakura-it.pl/floppy.php

I am pretty sure they are sold out but it is open source and you get boards made and use any PC floppy drive. I have a few of the boards and they do work great. As soon as I get my Amiga stuff unpacked I will eventually post some pics of it.

User avatar
Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 11:05 am

I've been meaning to do a sound test with my old Commodore external floppy and see how they compare with Intri8's. The thing I hate about that drive is that for me it's so incredibly loud. Perhaps that's because I have it on a metal table, but it's certainly much louder than the built in drive and any external drive I've had experience with. Intric8 said he thought it made less noise than the internal. Always an important thing for an Amiga user to have at least 1 external floppy. The other bad thing about the Commodore one is that there is no built in off switch for the drive. I have a program to turn off mine but it's much nicer to use some of the 3rd party drives that have the switch. The more memory, the better, and extra drives eat up precious chip ram. If you don't need them, then it should be easier than unplugging the thing to turn it off. Some games even told you to disable the external floppy for that extra ram (Wing Commander I'm looking at you), and of course some games with custom boot loaders disabled it by themselves.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 11:09 am

My external is silky smooth and quiet. That being said, I believe it was given a bit of a tune up before I hooked it up.

I hadn't told anyone this (here) yet, but when I got the NOS 2000 last month, I also picked up a brand new, in the box, NOS external drive.

I am going to sell my other one (which I just got!) and keep the NOS one.

I'll be able to compare the sounds yet again.

I love the sound of the Amiga external - at least, the one I've used recently. It sounds like a little purring tank. Lower in decibels than the 1200's side-slotter. Actually, quite a bit like the 2000's floppy. Out of all of them, the 2000 is probably the quietest (partly, I think, because the fan masks it a tiny bit).

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 11:21 am

The other bad thing about the Commodore one is that there is no built in off switch for the drive. I have a program to turn off mine but it's much nicer to use some of the 3rd party drives that have the switch.
That is true. An on/off switch would be nice. I keep mine unplugged when not in use just to keep the in-stereo disk seeking "click!" quiet. They probably didn't put switches on them since they don't use their own power supplies like the older machines (yay!!!) but it would be nice to put them to sleep when not in use. Totally agree.

Which program do you use to flip them on and off? Do you load it into the startup sequence, and just run 'Enable' whenever you need it? That would be very cool.

User avatar
Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 12:11 pm

Amiga used a few different mechanisms. I have some from Epson, Panasonic but mostly Chinon. The A1010 that I had was pretty loud too but only after a while of using it regularly. I was a chinon. The thing that made it loud was the drive seeking as it seems the case and metal shielding inside seemed to amplify the noise. The 1581 also uses a chinon mechanism and it has this same throaty seek that causes the case to rattle a bit. I think it can be mitigated a bit with some maintenance but if you got a quiet one that is great.

I still love floppy disks and with the Amiga it is a great feeling to load up an old disk and have it click to life.

User avatar
Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 12:16 pm

I use a program called Degrader. It would be useless to put into the startup sequence because it requires a restart... I mean maybe, I suppose you could just click out of it and resume loading if you didn't need it... Or even have it pop up after Workbench has loaded in case you wanted to use it. I primarily use the program to switch NTSC/PAL modes because the Amiga500 does not have that button pressing menu thing when you start the computer. It has a whole plethora of options but I just use it to switch graphics modes and turn off the disk drive. In order to turn off the drive you go into the text box for DF1: and write DF4: which can not exist, and thus shuts it off and frees up the memory.

http://aminet.net/package/util/misc/Degrader

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 12:19 pm

@shot that right there is super handy. Thanks for the tip!

User avatar
Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Fri Nov 18, 2016 12:48 pm

The thing I love about the program is you can set it up to continue with your settings after soft resets rather than just a one time thing. Does the boot up menu allow you to do that or does it go back to the original graphics mode upon reset? It may be possible to use that program to shut off the drive without restarting the computer. It does have options to do what you ask right away but because the chances are if I want to shut off the disk drive I also want to switch to graphics modes, and the graphics mode switch does require a restart, thus I haven't really thought to try shutting the drive off without restarting it. I just keep blank floppies in both drives to stop the clicking so that's never been an issue for me. I would only turn off the drive to free up chip ram, I've got plenty of slow ram, 8mbs worth, but with 1mb of chip ram there are games where the combination of using a hard drive and having the MagicWB icons will cause some games to not have enough ram to run or it takes features away. Civilization always tends to have graphical issues when you're building your palace unless I turn off the disk drive and use another program to free up a little more extra memory.





Return to “Conquests”