Booting an external floppy drive (Gotek) as a DF0 on A1200 etc possible ?

[dougal]

Firstly hi all, I've not posted on Amibay for ages and ages.

So, I know its been asked a hundred times probably even by me But has anyone ever come up with a PRACTICAL solution to being able to boot an external (DF1) drive as a DF0 on an A1200 ?

Yes yes I know about the Early Startup Control and choosing it from there but that only works with a tiny amount of games. I mean a real solution which does not involve having to cut traces, solder or replace the internal floppy drive with a Gotek.

And yes I know the A500's is a pretty easy mod to do but A1200 and A600 is not like that due to having SMD CIA's.


Cheers and thanks in advance

 

[BLTCON0]

Haven't verified this on an actual PCB but perhaps removing the 27 ohm resistors behind SEL0/SEL1 and implementing the crossover circuitry there is the easiest way to go.

 

[dougal]

Haven't verified this on an actual PCB but perhaps removing the 27 ohm resistors behind SEL0/SEL1 and implementing the crossover circuitry there is the easiest way to go.

It seems easy enough in theory but I was hoping to avoid actually modifying the actual hardware. Is there no possible way like modifying a custom Kickstart and booting it up using something like SKick ?

 

[BLTCON0]

No this won't work as the physical signal routing remains the same.
The only way to do a "hard" switch in "software" is to use an accelerator card which monitors writes to the CIA registers in real-time, and when a write for SEL0 occurs it transparently writes to the SEL1 register and vice versa. This could be an option in the accelerator's bootup menu, and would work fine since CIA registers aren't DMA accessed, only the CPU reads/writes there. Of course when the accelerator is in disabled state, the feature is lost.
And in reality it's not even a software solution, as it requires new hardware and the software would simply enable/disable the intercepting circuitry anyway.

 

[Evil_Ed]

a few years too late , but now there is an actual bootselector for the Amiga 1200 / 600 (No soldering required)

Shop : Amiga 1200 / 600 Bootselector DF0: - DF1: - Gotek Retro Add-ons And Support

Amiga 1200 / 600 Bootselector (no soldering required), this allows you to boot from DF0: or from the external DF1: (Which becomes DF0:)

www.gotek-retro.eu

 

[Dave11674]

@Evil_Ed
Id like one please
Ive sent an order note to you
Thank you

Dave

 

[Tbsnc99]

Need to purchase a few of these is there somewhere?