floppy fz357a

benny210881

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Aug 29, 2010
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Country
Australia
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N.S.W
hi all, im a bit stuck looking for advice, i have a chinnon fz-357a bought off here, works great but im a bit stuck as i have 2 a 1200's 1 commodore unit which it runs fine in, however this board after being on for 10 mins comes up detecting df0, 1, 2, 3 ????? thinking it has external drives when there not connected so i bought a brand new escom unit from amigakit, however this drive in this unit it appears to have a ready signal issue, im not sure what to do as my floppy doesnt have jumpers for this it only has the ds0,1,2,3 jumpers any ideas? any help would be appreciated thanks everyone
 
The Chinon FZ-357A always provides the READY signal, as it's meant to be an Amiga specific drive, so it's natural it doesn't offer that option.
If you're absolutely certain that it's an Escom motherboard, there's a quick fix which consists of wire-linking a pin on the external floppy port to a pin on the onboard floppy header.
 
from what i can tell, amigakit said this without looking up my machine, both my machines are board 1d4 amigakit said this is irrelevant though, is there a way to confirm this?
 
Only by looking at the motherboard, AFAIK the Escom-made ones which need the fix have a rectangular sticker on the PCB which reads e.g. A1200UK, has a barcode too I think.
I have such a board somewhere, I can look it up when back from work and take a couple of photos for you that show the fix needed.
 
mate that is what i thought, i have one with the sticker but its a1200 GR the fix i would greatly appreciate as i do your time for the info, if u can send the fix id appreciate it but will it affect the operation of DF1, 2, or 3?
 
Yeah the GR vs UK is probably just a country specific suffix but the source is the same.

The fix has absolutely no ill effects with respect to external units, by design the RDY signal (as well as lots of others) is shared among all drives. Which drive is concerned at a given moment is determined by the state of other signals.
All the fix does is make sure a pathway for the internal drive's RDY signal exists (in this case the pathway is provided via the external connectors RDY line, which remained connected as Escom only wanted to use bog standard PC drives as internal units).

Edit: Oh yeah, forgot the pics :p
Pin 34 on the internal connector is wire-linked to pin 1 on the external connector, so the RDYs are bridged.
 

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