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/  Forum Index
   /  Classic Amiga Hardware
      /  External floppy drive A500
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Dragoon 
External floppy drive A500
Posted on 8-Sep-2020 16:43:02
#1 ]
Member
Joined: 25-Aug-2020
Posts: 12
From: Finland

Hi there! I recently bought myself an external floppy disk drive to my Amiga 500. In fact I bought it just because it was so cheap, 10€. My question now is what can I do with it? My Amiga is completely original with its own internal disk drive, so basically I now have two disk drives. What was the original intention with the external disk drive? Was it mainly for Workbench related tasks or was it possible to load games from both drives to reduce disk swapping? I know these are pretty n00b questions but I'm quite new into retro gaming concerning Amigas.

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sundown 
Re: External floppy drive A500
Posted on 8-Sep-2020 18:20:03
#2 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 30-Aug-2003
Posts: 5120
From: Right here...

@Dragoon

Hi & welcome to AW.

Been a long time since I used my A500 & I had 2 floppy drives. Main use was to stop swapping of game disks while loading & playing.

_________________
Hate tends to make you look stupid...

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Drewlio77 
Re: External floppy drive A500
Posted on 8-Sep-2020 18:21:15
#3 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 2-Jan-2008
Posts: 781
From: Woodstock, Ontario, Canada

@Dragoon

The External Disk Drive can be used by multiple disk based games if the Game supports it. In my experience, more often than not, most don't. Pretty much a luck of the draw in this case. In the Workbench Environment, External Disk Drives work great.

Drewlio77

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scuzz 
Re: External floppy drive A500
Posted on 9-Sep-2020 0:54:19
#4 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 30-May-2004
Posts: 365
From: New Forest United Kingdom

@Dragoon

Kinda essential when playing music/vidoe demos as they interchange and flick between each other so you can enjoy the whole thing without changing disks.

Very useful for copying disk information or transferring files from one to tother and using disk copy software when needing the dongle.

You can set both DF0 and DF1 to work as PC reading drives so that you can open one as a PC drive.

https://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/scuzzblog_march20/scuzzblogdmarch20_2401.htm

The games issue is a real problem swapping disks and so is very helpful.

One last thing and that is you may have issues with one or other of your drives and so its very useful to have the back up.

By the way you can daisy chain another drive from the back of your 3.5" floppy. What is more you can use a 5.25" drive as a second external drive. I do that also on my A1000.

https://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/scuzzblog_july17/car_sbd_270717_37.jpg

On the Checkmate [ A500 inside a metal case ]

https://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/scuzzblog_july17/car_sbd_270717_48.jpg

A floppy with an LED. How cool is that.


scuzz

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Dragoon 
Re: External floppy drive A500
Posted on 9-Sep-2020 8:08:37
#5 ]
Member
Joined: 25-Aug-2020
Posts: 12
From: Finland

Wow, thanks a lot for your answers! I instantly got wiser

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Templario 
Re: External floppy drive A500
Posted on 9-Sep-2020 8:12:06
#6 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 22-Jun-2004
Posts: 3663
From: Unknown

@Dragoon
It is very useful for games like Defender of the Crown for example, unfortunately also there are games of more of one disk that not use the second disk drive.

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