15 September 2021

Amiga with 2 internal drives (gotek & diskdrive) (Poor men solution)

In this post i’m going to show you how to make it technical posible to have 2 drives (Gotek & disk drive) inside a Amiga 500, 600 or 1200.

The internal FDD header (CN11) does not have all the needed signals to add 2 drives to this header, it’s imposible to have a DF0 & DF1 at the same time on the internal header. _MTRX & _RESET  are missing. But! What can be done with a simple trick is to switch between the 2 drives, both will be seen as DF0 which makes it easy to ready ADF images from gotek and normal floppy disks. With this trick you can even use X-Copy to read a ADF image from a Gotek drive and write it back to a real disk.

In this post I uses a Amiga 600.

NOTE: Simon Vergauwen pointed me out a micronik adaptor which could provide 2 drives on DF0 & DF1 for internal usage.
If I have that info, I will add it to this post.

Proceed at your own risk! I’m not responsible for any damage to your board! I’m not responsible for mistakes you make. 

The basics

To achive this you need a long floppydisk cable, and alter this cable like this.

Pin 10 of the internal floppy connector (CN11) holds the _SEL0 signal, which is used to control DF0. To use two drives you need to switch this signal to one of both drives.

I used a long cable like this, and added 2 extra connectors to it:

Then I  freed the wire from pin 10 on both sides of the middle connector:

I soldered a 3 wired cable to the wires, and added some heat shrink tubes to protect the wires from shorting:

I added a switch to that cable:

Now the basics are ready. Now connect the middle connector to the board (CN11), and the other two connectors to the drives.

For the power I used some spare (left overs) power connectors and soldered them together like this:

Does it work?

Time to put everything together

The case

Because I’m going to use a Gotek and a readl floppy drive, I altered the case to add the gotek to the left side of the Amiga 600.

Result / testing

In the following video I show:

  • Load X-Copy from a real disk
  • Set both source and target to DF0
  • Set Gotek (FlashFloppy) to my Amiga Test Kit ADF image
  • Switch to Gotek drive
  • Read disk image with X-Copy
  • After the reading is done, switch to real floppy drive
  • Write Amiga Test Kit to the real disk
  • Load Amiga Test Kit from the real disk

And it works like a charm!