Are internal disk drives for Amigas wanted / needed

[mark1968]

Guys and Gals,

I went on a bit of a journey in the last few weeks. I decided to buy a s**t ton of PC floppy drives and covert them. I get about a 50% success rate. 10% dont work at all (even in a PeeCEE), 20% are virtually unconvertable as the PCB are hidden or inaccessible without destroying the whole drive. The rest are successful ( i can mod them for DS0/1, pin2/34 and ready). Some refuse to work for unknown reasons (ie the same identical models, same identical mod one works one doesn't).

So out of 10 random drives 5 will be perfect Amiga drives. TEAC, Samsung tend to be the best.

If i come across a drive i already modded, it takes about 5 minutes to mod (even with my basic skills)

So my question is:

A typical PC drive is about £<Snip> - an Amiga drive 30-40 (some more expensive) is there a demand for modded PC drives out there?

I would consider doing this service for no profit to the community, what do you think?

 

[btp]

For me the Amiga experience is strongly linked with floppy drives. So having a working one is a necessity. I prefer them compared to a Gotek (though I totally understand the easy of use of floppy emulators). Then there is the issue of modified drives never being 100% compatible which makes me feel insecure relying on an adapted floppy drive (I've read about it but have not personal experience since I'm using native Amiga drives).

 

[mark1968]

For me the Amiga experience is strongly linked with floppy drives. So having a working one is a necessity. I prefer them compared to a Gotek (though I totally understand the easy of use of floppy emulators). Then there is the issue of modified drives never being 100% compatible which makes me feel insecure relying on an adapted floppy drive (I've read about it but have not personal experience since I'm using native Amiga drives).

i think depends on what the use case is. any PC drive is 100% compatible if 2 of the three mods can be done. The "ready" line (not use by PC, is only really required for disk duplication with a cyclone cartridge or some games. To be honest you would have to be dead in the wood Amiga original only hardware nerd to still be trying to copy disks that way, and play the games that way. lol

 

[btp]

I would suggest to look at the following post: https://www.amibay.com/threads/4-x-...a-a500-and-other-models.2451314/#post-2534228

and try if the games/disk images listed there load successfully on the modded PC drives

 

[darefail]

Recently I put up for sale 2 Sony drives which they can load every game or demo.
Jurrasicman told me to test them with 2 specific games. Kid chaos and gremlins 2, from his list.
To my surprise I couldn't load them in my A1200.
When I tested them with the same drive on my A500 they loaded ok.
They don't like 68030? AGA? Anyway..

Samsung drives do have the ready signal available on the pcb but they act weirdly in A500 1.3 through workbench.
Any other pc drive lacks the ready signal. All these modifications out there take this signal from wherever, to give a pseudo ready and there are some games or demos that they can't be loaded.
Big deal.. But at the end, everybody wants to have a drive that loads everything. Or nobody wants to have a drive that can't load even a single game