ACA500 Plus Vs Gotek Floppy Emulator

[lemonje]

I've purchased an ACA500+ to give my original Amiga 500 rev/6 a new lease of life.

I've not yet installed the device, but I was wondering if installing the ACA500+ and using the compact flash card feature support by the ACA makes buying the Gotek Floppy Emulator redundant? Is there any benefit to be had by installing both devices on the A500 at the same time?

Any advice gratefully received

 

[doboos]

i would say...it makes sense to install both:

gotek is a floppy-emulator...and the CF is a "Harddisk-Replacement".. so you dont need anymore physical floppys to install software on your Harddisk(CF)


Dom

 

[drpugh]

I have an Amiga 500 Plus with a Gotek (HxC firmware) and an ACA500Plus and as doboos says the CF is the hard drive and the Gotek is the floppy drive.

I use the CF to transfer files to my Amiga that are not ADFs, so either larger than a floppy, or lha, etc. basically for things that want Workbench and I use the Gotek for games, demos, etc.

I have an external round cable from a.mi.goun for the Gotek and use it like that as with Kickstart 2.04 and above it is bootable, plus now I have the ACA500Plus it can be made bootable on earlier Kickstarts. I would be tempted to get the internal support and get a proper external floppy drive if I could not do this.

If I was to get another Gotek drive I would put the Flash Floppy firmware on it, following the instructions from the recent video on YouTube by Glen Planamento.

 

[lemonje]

Many thanks for the feedback chaps.
I've gone ahead and ordered a Gotek to fit to my A500/r6 with ACA500+.

PS. I've already managed to find ADF files for all the games I've purchased (as some floppies are now unreadable), but I also have a collection of magazine disks and custom workbench disks I've built in the early 90's.

Q. What's the easiest way to image an AMIGA Floppy disk onto an ADF file transferred to a PC for safe keeping?

Many thanks

Steve
Jersey

 

[demolition]

Q. What's the easiest way to image an AMIGA Floppy disk onto an ADF file transferred to a PC for safe keeping?

Use a program like TSgui to read the floppy to an ADF file and then transfer it to a CF card using the ACA500plus.

 

[Retro_Lover]

A cheap way of backing up your Amiga floppy disks is with a old Windows XP PC, 2x 3.5" floppy drives installed, and a program called DISK2FDI. Drive A: uses your Amiga disks, Drive B: uses a blank disk to simulate a hardware pulse - emulating the original Amiga floppy drive. I have backed up most of my old Amiga PD disks, music mods, and my own music mods. I was also able to back up a few original copy-protected disks.

It's not as good as a hardware solution like the Catweasel[FONT=verdana, geneva, lucida, lucida grande, arial, helvetica, sans-serif], but it's a lot cheaper.[/FONT]

 

[demolition]

Since he already has an ACA500plus and, presumably, a working floppy drive in the A500, he would not need to acquire any extra hardware to make images of his disks. And besides, old PCs with good floppy drives are starting to become expensive now.

 

[Retro_Lover]

Old DOS PCs are getting expensive. Windows XP PCs are in their hundreds on the bay, and cheap as chips. Although I agree with your first bit.

 

[lemonje]

Thanks chaps for all the feedback.
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