Use a PC Floppy drive on a Commodore Amiga! 

I did. I bought 1.76.MB HD Floppy for Amiga 500, and formatted PC floppies on it.

Certainly not in the hey days of Amigas back in the day. Some PC drives did work on Atari ST's though.

+Rich Kearney Thanks mate!

Cheers Colin! Well done on the restoration!

​@@MarkFixesStuff - At 4:40 Bro, TMI!! ha-ha-ha

+Richard Clifton haha! You are easily pleased! Thank you very much, you epic beast you!

and to save you the customer some money.

Same,and I've got a panasonic floppy drive on hand for me to mod.

@@gamepad3173 Nice.

/slides into +Douglas Titchmarsh ‘s DMs

Thank you Svein!

Cheers Peter!!

@Mr T. Guru well yeah I imagine it is, but never having needed to, why would I know... 🤔

Thank you for watching!

yes, in 1988 i paid 300 Deutschmark for an external NEC Drive.

MadPete cheer Pete!!

I was tired the next day, but worth it!

Thanks for watching! I have the tiniest tool!

+GadgetUK164 - Retro Gaming Repairs & Mods cheers Gadget! Hope you are well mate.

It's like the Evil Knieval of Amigas

Thanks Daniel

Thanks for joining me on my learning journey.

+thebongmaster oh yes, or even think about FlashFloppy!

thats a plan a little later on :) just need to get something working soon to boot up while i am waiting for parts :) I only have the mainboard atm XD need everything else XD gonna take a while to gather the rest due to funds.

Brilliant news! Well done!

​@@MarkFixesStuff A short follow up. The drive was behaving badly when I had it installed with a GoTek floppy emulator or another disk. Didn't matter if it was DF0: or DF1: or first or last on the floppy cable. I swear it had been working. I did a little more research and saw a video on the channel "Chris Edwards Restoration" where he modified a comparable Alps floppy drive. In the comments, a user, ripxkid, suggested using a diode, cathode connected to Ready, anode to connector pin 34. I also noted Chris did not cut the trace connecting the controller to connector pin 2. I started to trouble shoot the original floppy I converted and in the process broke pin 5 off the controller. So, out came a new drive and I did the modification again only this time I did not cut the trace to connector pin 2 from the controller and I installed a 1N4148 diode between Ready and connector pin 34. I have tested this several different ways and it all seems to work. I am not comfortable with pin 2 connected to two pins on the controller chip, but no smoke and it works. Thought I'd share the information for what it may be worth. Sorry for rambling. Thank you again for the video. It got me started on a much needed project.

@Neb6 2200? Yikes! 😲

@Neb6 Did you say 2,200?!? 😱

+Gaz Marshall thank you mate!

+To masz it was a gift from my daughters for my birthday. It’s very nice and my old green mat was looking tired. It has magnetic screw holders!

Mariusz Koźliński thank you. It’s good to learn this. I’ll be making a follow up video in the future

+1 Mariusz. This mod works only with 1 internal floppy drive.

+gavinc74 thanks!

it have to be same model. 99.9% you cant have same

@@jarisipilainen3875 Hmmm, that's not good. But thanks for the hint!

Samsung SFD-321B revisions up to T4 are the easiest to mod and very common.

Thank you +X Xycom! That is brilliant!

If we are thinking about the same lists, they were wrong in some (many?) cases. Ready Signal was identified by try and error instead of an oscilloscope.

Marcian0 honestly wouldn't be able to tell ya; up to that point I was convinced that PC floppy drives were not compatible at all than I seen some information about some adapter that could be used to adapt a floppy drive; from that I eventually found the list of drives..... I dunno about inconsistencies on drives but that was cause from the start I was quite willing to accept the idea especially with smaller companies there was a likelihood of 152 variants of the same model floppy drives; I was expecting there to be inconsistances..... even now a day on a different topic; installing an alarm system on my car, I'm referring to information available for 4 years worth of 3 different model cars to get an idea where everything should be cause apparently the Canadian version of the car doesn't follow the exact same wiring convention as the American and worse yet the car was made by a different company than it's badge(pontiac vibe:P).... the nature of electronics sometimes lol

ldisc66 most PC drives are set to DS1 by default, and lack the ready signal on the appropriate pin. You were lucky I guess? Worth noting that later A1200 machines from Escom were pre modded to use standard drives.

@@MarkFixesStuff It's wild, decades later I'm still learning new things about the Amiga computer 🍻

@Mr T. Guru Thank you.

Yes, with the caveat that some of the later Escom Amiga 1200 machines had a fix on the motherboard to use PC drives, and that is best reversed before using a modded drive.

Only my hazy memories brother.

Oh no, that died in the fire and the one on Amazon is stupidly expensive. I actually got it for about £4 in the Lidl special buys!

anthony smith should fit ok with a slight mod to the eject button.

@Mr T. Guru Thanks: figures. Would be a great upgrade if it didn't.

+Javier you’re welcome!

I think some specific Big Box Amiga machines can use PC HD but I'm no expert!

@@MarkFixesStuff any amiga with a 2.04 rom and newer can use high density. There are some hacks on A1k german forum to use sony pc floppy drives as HD.

I don't actually know - Sorry!

Not without removing the bezel and printing some 3d modifications

@@MarkFixesStuff I don't have a 3d printer, but there are shops. Thank you.

Prego

Mat Recardo that’s a different story but quite easy.

Possibly. I know this kind of mod works with MSX as well, so it'S likely the 8-bits need the rdy signal

Just common factory mod. I think it does something with the RAM but can't be sure from memory. Nothing exciting though.

This model of drive would require some cutting and glueing as it's not really that common. The Samsung drives can be fitted with a small mod to the metal tab IIRC?

@@MarkFixesStuff I have absolutely tons of floppy drives (like several hundred - yes around about 500!). Would you like some different models so you can try out all models of floppy drives and do some more excellent videos. I have ALPS, Samsung, TEAC, NEC, Mitsubishi, Epsom, Sony, Citizen, Chinon, Yamaha(?), Toshiba...etc. Free or 'donation' of course...postage is likely around £3 unless you live on the moon.

@@ojbeez5260 do you still gave these drives ?. .. i know im a bit late here lol .

Just in DD mode.

@@MarkFixesStuff Thank you. But it is originally a HD PC drive, isn't it?

@@TheArtofWalls Yes sir!

@@MarkFixesStuff I wonder if there's a way to modify the Paula chip to allow it to read and write to HD disks. As I recall, it's a bit too slow for that. Might be able to add some hardware there to intercept the signal or something. IDK

@@CoyoteSeven The Amiga HD floppy reduced the RPM's from 300 to 150 to use HD mode, so this would be challenging to archive with PC floppys which rotate constantly at 300RPM. I cannot remember. was it 1024 bytes per sector or 22 sectors? I think, 22 Sectors were used, like the MB02 disc interface for ZX Spectrum And you cannot xcopy game DD to HD discs.

yes its MS1. name dosent matter he pointed it. yes CN is connector. no body wil unsolder CN1 even he say so ;D

To be honest I’m not sure. I don’t think you’d damage anything by trying but I’m also not sure it would work …

@@MarkFixesStuff If it doesn't work, it's not the end of the universe, it's just my pc 3.5" drive won't write 720k disks in Windows(yes, even through command line or using actual 720k disks, it just errors out) so I have to boot into Ubuntu if I wanna move files to my Amiga. Being able to use PC1: to read 1.44mb disks would save hours of faffing.

Figured I'd update. It doesn't break anything, it shows up in Workbench and it even tried to use it, but it just errors out if you try to use it.

@@fattomandeibu that’s a shame. Thanks for the update. I wonder if it can be made to work somehow.

@@MarkFixesStuff After a bit of reading, it's to do with the bit rate being too high for Paula to handle. Apparently you'd either need a hardware buffer, or to halve the RPM of the drive somehow, the latter of which is what was used for official A4000 HD drives.

I'll put it on the list!

I think an ST will just use a PC drive as is?

@@MarkFixesStuff Not exactly - for the ST you also have to set it to drive 0, and it is much harder to make disk change detection to work, as in ST it actually uses pulses on /WP line while ejecting/inserting a floppy disk to the drive.

tzok83 good info. Never even thought about it to be honest! Thank you.

@@MarkFixesStuff I replaced drives on STFM, MSTE, TT and Falcon with no issues and I didn't have to do a thing. I guess you lose 2-drive capability but who really needs 2 drives on an ST. :)

@@AmstradExin I loved my atari to bits , but the diskswapping on some games was hellish....

DS-HD so very common. Not all drives work but quite a few do.

Of course. That is why you use the old tape-over-the-hole trick. Even though the OS reads DD only on most Amiga's, the drive will still read as HD if the switch is not activated inside the drive. You can bypass, by using a piece of tape on the floppy Disk it self, or you can bridge the switch inside the drive with solder. The latter, will make the drive read/write permanently in DD mode.

@@brostenen Yes indeed. I neglected to mention that. I think there is a jumper on these drives to disable it.

@@MarkFixesStuff Ahh... Sorry to have written it as a (main?)-comment to this video as well. Did not think you read my answer to another viewer. 😁

Sorry I didn't get my point across very well and perhaps wasn't clear what i was getting at. Given that the PC drive was most likely HD, could the Amiga now format and read 1.44MB rather than the normal 720KB