1. Workbench 3.1 Adf

As I suspected before I started with this little mini project - there would be some tricks to get it working on an Amiga 1000 due to the need for the Kickstart disk before anything else could happen. As regular readers of my blog would probably remember, last year I bought the Gotek Floppy Drive emulator and tried it out on my Amiga 600. That blog entry is if you want to review it first as I cover the functionality of the Gotek in much more detail than I will here. So, can I get it to work in the Amiga 1000? To start with, I took off the case, which marks the first time I have opened the Amiga 1000 since I got it.

Once open I took a look at the case cover inside, and it does have all the signatures on it as I had seen in pictures elsewhere! I was glad to see it (All photos in this entry can be clicked to be expanded).

Before we can connect the Gotek Floppy Drive Emulator to the Amiga 1000 though I have had to do some things first. Namely, copy the Amiga 1000 specific Kickstart 1.3 disk (ADF format) and Workbench 1.3 Disk (ADF format) to the Gotek USB stick.

As discussed in my previous blog post on the Gotek, there is a selector.adf program on position 000 of the Gotek which enables you to select disks to assign to each slot on the Gotek. However, this selector.df needs the Kickstart to be loaded first on the Amiga 1000.

This means we need to assign the Kickstart 1.3 ADF on the Gotek using selector.adf to do that. However, this is not possible to do on the Amiga 1000 itself because once I connect the Gotek and disconnect the floppy drive, there is no way to load the kickstart disk needed to then load the selector.ADF!! Enter my trusty Amiga 600 to save the day. I connected the Gotek to it first so I could configure the Selector.adf on it to use the Kickstart 1.3 ADF in Slot 001, then save it. Having established the Gotek works great on the Amiga 1000, I next needed to work out a way to keep it connected and still have the option to go back to the original floppy drive if I ever want to. I found a longer Amiga floppy drive cable I had spare and ran it from the internal Amiga 1000 floppy drive connector outside through the right hand expansion port. I then used an external molex power source (used for powering IDE/SATA hard disks for USB connection) and used a molex to floppy drive power connector splitter.

This means the internal floppy drive is no longer functional - but I can always reconnect it again if need be. This external setup is not perfect I know, but does allow me to put the case back on the Amiga 1000 and keep things reasonably tidy - I have no intention of hacking up the case to make it fit inside. I just did this modification. I didn't need another Amiga to put kickstart in position 1 either: Boot off the internal floppy drive with kickstart, then eject Kickstart and then without powering off the A1000, disconnect and reconnect the DF0 floppy cable to the Gotek. Then do a warm reboot (Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga) and it will boot into the Selector program and you can put a kickstart ADF file on one of the slots. Also I didn't bother putting the steel cover back over the motherboard, I just put the plastic lid on, and that way I was able to let the ribbon cable come out of the back of the A1000 just under the cover rather than the side.

Workbench 3.1 Adf

No stress on the expansion port that way and the computer looks much more symmetrical.