Using 3 Disk Drives with the Gold Card

[RWAP]

According to the manual, the Gold Card supports 3 disk drives natively, or you could use the Miracle expander to connect 4 drives...

I just wondered if anyone had ever done this - bearing in mind that the Gold Card only has one disk drive socket (unlike the Super Gold Card) how would you cable up 3 drives to use with the unit?

[Derek_Stewart]

According to the manual, the Gold Card supports 3 disk drives natively, or you could use the Miracle expander to connect 4 drives...

I just wondered if anyone had ever done this - bearing in mind that the Gold Card only has one disk drive socket (unlike the Super Gold Card) how would you cable up 3 drives to use with the unit?

Hi Rich,

The Gold Card can only access 2 Disk Drives. To access 4 Disk Drives, a Disk Card is required, which was built into the Super Gold Card... That was the official line.

But it is strange you say that, I always wondered if more drives could accessed.

I have 2 Gold Cards, one working and the other is sleeping, due to battery leakage damaging 2 chips.
I will try this out wit the drives I have.

[tofro]

Actually, before IBM messed up the Shugart standard for floppy drives, you could have up to for drives on one single controller..... (The original Shugart bus has 4 drive select lines).

Good explanations are here
http://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/floppies.html
and here
http://pinouts.ru/Storage/InternalDisk_pinout.shtml

I think the Miracle cards support the full Shugart standard.

Tobias

[1024MAK]

Actually, before IBM messed up the Shugart standard for floppy drives, you could have up to for drives on one single controller..... (The original Shugart bus has 4 drive select lines).

Yes, all on a single "multi-drop" ribbon cable

In theory it's not that difficult to add even more drives, as a lot of disk controller chips don't actually provide the drive select lines. Instead these are often from a latch chip. So for more drives, another latch chip can be wired in (may need some more address decoding logic) and some changes to the driver software and you can have another eight drives or more...!!!

The reason that manufacturers reduced or dropped support for more than 2 drives is because HDD became cheaper, so there was no longer a need to have so many floppy drives.

And even before then, it was rare to actually need more than two floppy drives.

Mark

[Derek_Stewart]

Hi,

I remember mentioning this to Stuart Honeyball of Miracle Systems that most disk interfaces supported 4 Disk Drives, which he indicated that the design of the Gold Card only supported 2 Disk Drives. He would not be drawn any further on this.

I am not sure if this is correct, as Miracle launched a Disk Card which had 2 Disk Drive connections for FLP1/FLP2 and FLP3/FLP4. The Disk Drives had to configured as FLP1/FLP2 (DS0/DS1) on each connection on the Disk Card. This can be seen on the Super Gold Card.

But if the disk controller could handle up to 4 Disk Drives, maybe it is possible by configuring the Disk Drive to D2 for FLP3_ and DS4 for FLP4_, I am sure this has already been tried, worth a try.

The Gold Card amd Super Gold Card uses PC style Disk Interface. This would appear to differ from the Shuggart standard. Which is why the a PC style Disk Drive will not work in an Amiga... all the disk drives I have connected to QL Disk Interfaces has been PC Disk Drives or interchanged from Atari ST.

[Ralf R.]

Martin Berndt once changed my SQB, so it was able to use DS0 to DS3 on the SQB connector with standard Shugart compatible disk drives. I had used that with my NEC 3,5" drives as 1 and 2 and an 5,25" drive as 3, for cheaper backups.

[Cristian]

The Gold Card amd Super Gold Card uses PC style Disk Interface. This would appear to differ from the Shuggart standard. Which is why the a PC style Disk Drive will not work in an Amiga...

Well, now I'm a little confused. Actually the PC FDDs do differ from the Shugart standard. For PC use, they had to change the DS0/DS1 and READY settings, and build a special twisted flat cable.
I don't know Super Gold Cards, but the TrumpCard requires Shugart FDDs: DS0, RDY, and normal flat cable (without twisted wires).
Moreover, I replaced my Amiga600 drive with a PC FDD, with some minor modifications (DS0, RDY signal...). It's working quite well (read, write, loading games etc.).
I hope these info can be useful...