Amiga 500 vs Gotek drive vs KMTech extension board

Previously I wrote about the Gotek drive with Cortex firmware for Amiga computers. It works like a charm, the only issue is the placement. I wanted it inside the A500 without drilling additional holes on the original case so I was looking for a solution.

Actually, I found a great solution quite fast. Googled "mount gotek into amiga 500" and got a bunch of forum posts and this: KMTech's Gotek Extension Board

This is a nice looking board that is easy to assemble into the A500. I don't want to go into details, their webpage shows the installation steps nice and clear. A little bit of soldering required but don't worry, you can do it if I was able to do it :)

I simply followed the steps and mounted the 2 boards together into the Amiga:

That adhesive stuff keeps the boards in place. It's not super-strong but strong enough. You can try to hotglue them to the plastic, it'd be definitely stronger, however, permanent.

Of course, there are many options to mount the Gotek inside the Amiga, this is one of the easiest and fastest solutions. I'm very happy with the result, it looks good and the plastic case is still intact.



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Today's music: Driveclub OST

Gotek vs Amiga 500

The Girlfriend 500 - sounds like a cheesy advertisement in one of those weird TV shows, right? - is a beautiful computer of its time and nowadays it still has the charm. I remember, I was around 14-15 years old when one of my mates bought an A500 and we played games, watched demoscene productions all weekend long without pause. I had a C64 back then, we used 386 PC's in school and the difference between the computers were remarkable. While I was still in love with the C64, the PC's were kinda soulless, or how to describe it. The Commodore computers definitely had somekind of charm and personality. Not just because the audio-video capabilities but... I don't have words to describe it. They were just simply better :)

So, I have an A500. Cleaned it from top to bottom, from inside to outside and... It doesn't load any software from any disk, while the same disks work without problem in my A1200.
Captain Obvious here, the A500's floppy drive is broken.

I've read a few articles about fixing it, but I decided to order a Gotek drive with the Cortex Amiga Firmware. It's a clever device and a clever new firmware that might not work with the A500' without further modification. There can be an issue with older Kickstart and/or using the Gotek as additional (DF1) floopy and not primary (DF0).

I simply replaced the broken floppy drive with the Gotek:

And it works. Just, simply works. It's sooooo comfortable to copy .ADF (Amiga Disk Format) files to the USB stick and switch whenever it's needed.

However, the first setup of the USB stick wasn't obvious on the first look but fortunately I was able to gather all the required information from various forums.

The Gotek with Cortex Amiga firmware is not enough on its own, the USB stick needs a file called SELECTOR.ADF.

You can download it from Cortex' page, don't forget to rename the extension to .ZIP: cortexamigafloppyemulator_v105a.docx

The SELECTOR.ADF can be found in \cortexamigafloppyemulator_v105a.zip\CortexAmigaFloppyEmulator\Bootdisk\ folder.
By default it is an empty disk file.

Next step is to download games, demos, whatever you want to run on the A500. One of the best source of demoscene productions is http://pouet.net
Use the "Search Box" feature on the top-right corner of the page.

I downloaded ~100 demos for the A500 (OCS/ECS), but oh noes, a lot of them were .DMS and not .ADF files. This is a compressed Amiga Disk Format, WinUAE can read it without any problem but the Gotek can't. It works with .ADF files only.

Don't worry, there is a solution for that!
ADF Opus and its batch convert option did the job and converted the DMS files to ADF in a few seconds.

Now we need to create a "tracklist" that the Gotek and its SELECTOR.ADF would use for listing/tracking of the .ADF files on the USB stick.

There is a tool called Amiga Gotek Cortex SELECTOR.ADF Edit (pretty long title but it perfectly describes the tool).

• install SELECTOR.ADF Edit
• copy .ADF files, including SELECTOR.ADF to USB stick
• run SELECTOR Edit
• quit SELECTOR.Edit
• pause Kaspersky and/or any other virus scanner
• run SELECTOR Edit again

The tool scans and lists all the .ADF files on the USB stick, now you can move the files from the right-side to the left-side, then click SAVE. This will be your "playlist" and you can select the disk image files with the small buttons on the Gotek drive.

Insert the USB stick to the Gotek, boot up the Amiga. The SELECTOR.ADF will start automatically and you can browse the list and run any of the .ADF files. Yaaaaay, happiness, flawless victory.

I've spent the whole night with watching some neat demoscene stuff and enjoyed the same goosebumps as I had X years ago.

Sushi Boyz by Ghostown:

Rink a Dink Redux by Lemon:

And a lot more of course :)

Now the next step is to mount the Gotek drive into the A500 without drilling, without destroying the plastic case. That's the story of the future, I'll share it with you once it's done.



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Today's classic A500 demo: Enigma by Phenomena

Lemon. aka. "Winners don't use AGA"

I've met with the Amiga somewhere around 1993 where one of the guys in the youth hostel showed us some great demoscene productions on his A500. Since that point I had the good ol' C64 and we used 386 PC's at school. The difference between the PC and Amiga was remarkable. The graphics, the audio, the games... everything was just... simply wow.

More than 20 years later I bought an A500. It was just about time.

The machine is a bit yellowed but who cares, I'm gonna retr0bright the sh*t out of it. The fl0ppy disk is broken, it doesn't load anything just gives a "corrupted floppy disk" error message. Whatever, I might gonna invest into a Gotek drive later. I have an Amiga 500! :)

However, the most important part is the 512kbyte memory expansion. These expansions usually as old as the Amiga itself and the mounted battery starts to leak. Badly.

After some research I found that this is normal, as these batteries weren't made for eternity, obviously. If you are lucky then the acid doesn't eat the circuit - and I was lucky.

The leak wasn't _that_ bad, it was just _bad_. Removed the expansion, it was stuck a bit bit I used the force (pun not intended). And desoldered the leaking battery and removed the infected chip as well.

The chip looks like a dead bug but actually it's not dead, just resting. The battery however, is dead.

Side-note: if you have a closer look on the photos you should realize 3 of the 4 similar chips are in a mount but the 4th is not. It's soldered into the panel without a mount. Why?

Anyway, the next step was to clean the panel and the infected areas. What would you use to remove acid?

LEMON! Really. This has something to do with chemistry, pH and acid and alkali stuff, whatever. I don't know about the exact background of it but I gave it a try and used some real lemon juice to clean the panel.

Cut a lemon to half, squeeze the juice out of it into a bowl, stick an earbud into it then pour a lot of lemon drips into the panel, cover all the acid-areas with the juice. You can hear a bit of sizzling noise, this means the lemon fights with the acid. And the lemon will win, you can be sure.

Leave them fight for an hour, then clean the panel with water, let it dry out for some days and voila.

Actually, I was double-lucky this time because the acid didn't melt deeper into the panel and cleaning was simple, there was not necessary to do some electronic soldering work.

Coming up next: cleaning a slightly yellowed A500 and fix the broken floppy drive.



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Today's music: Rink A Dink Redux by LEMON. (A500 demo)