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Amiga 500 – Internal IDE Port

Whilst looking for side-car Amiga A590 Hard drives for the Amiga 500, I found this deisgn at PCBWay of an internal IDE interface. The design seemed pretty straight-forward, but it did have its caveats. The main one was that this device does not Auto-Configure and therefore needs a boot floppy to use it. This wouldn't have been such a bad problem, if it wasn't for the fact that I wasn't able to write a bootable floppy disk. I therefore got my Goteks working in the A500 first.

In case you didn't know, PCBWay is a fully-fledged PCB design and fabrication site. They even provide a community side (similar to Thingyverse for 3D printing) where users can upload their designs and anyone can have them made! After finding this design on their site, I followed the checkout and a few of boards created. I wanted to save money, so I had two other designs created at the same time... but I'll talk about them in later posts.

With the PCBs now in my hand, it was time to fill them up and test the devices. Using the shopping list of parts provided at the original site, I purchased everything I needed from either Digi-Key or Jaycar.

This all arrived at around the same time and, thanks to being locked up at home due to a bug floating around the entire world, I now had time to get this thing built! First-thing's-first... take your bloody time doing this, otherwise ... or, as I did on the very first build ... you'll solder items in backwards. I quickly put that first attempt aside and started again.

Jaycar only had horizontal 50-pin IDC headers, so I cut it down to fit... not the prettiest!

I also purchased pin strips of both male and female thinking that the board had two individual areas for the male and female pins that the CPU plugs through.

Turns out that was totally wrong and you need to make sure you get the 'triple-length' female pin strips! Here's the item at Jaycar.

They're not cheap, but you want absolute stability when you're dealing with a piggy-backed CPU!

Note that if you look closely at that middle photo.. you'll see that I failed to solder two pins. Sure, the strength of the solder on the neighbouring pins will probably force contact... but... again... take your time!

The IDE header required a re-think back to my 386 upgrade. There's an issue here between providing a male or female pin header on the board. Officially, this is the 'host' of the IDE channel so, like any motherboard, it should provide male pins. You can then use a cable to provide a female IDC connector if your device has male pins. Also note that some units (like the transcend disk-on-a-stick in over here) are built to plug straight into motherboards and therefore will plug straight into this unit.

The only real thing you need to worry about is that if you're using a CF to IDE adapter, make sure it has a female header on it, i.e. on that's meant to go straight into a motherboard, or, if it has male pins, that you have a short IDE cable to go with it. Look over here for the logic on how to run the IDE cable... making sure that you get the pins in the correct order.

Mounting it

It was now finally built! Mounting it into the A500 I had open on the workbench took a little more effort than I expected. It turns out the legs of the piggy-back pin header are quite a bit thicker than the legs of the standard 68000 CPU. This meant that the whole unit required quite a shove to get it into the socket. It also made me wonder if the CPU would happily sit back in again afterwards if I ever had to revert this work. Firstly, anyway, I had to remove the cpu!

I'm pretty sure I mentioned something about taking your time with these things... After successfully removing the CPU from the motherboard, I also successfully bent two pins when mounting it onto my new PCB. Relax, breathe, grab a set of tweezers... realign the pins without snapping and try again!

It was in and, without a disk connected, the machine still powered up. Make sure you test this scenario as a milestone during your build!

Connecting the disk required a little trickery with the power cables. Thankfully there's a 5v header on the adapter and that's all this disk needs.

Testing it

In the zip file provided on the original site, you'll find bootable disk images that have the IDE device driver included. Or do they? It turns out Kickstart 1.3 also had the IDE driver inside... but 1.2 didn't? At first, I connected my Transcend disk-on-a-stick and booted the unit using the Boot_WB13.adf from the original site. I got the following:

Ok, c/assign can't be found. From what I've learnt, c is a folder on all Workbench installations with standard binary tools. Something like the DOS folder in MS-DOS or the /bin folder in Unix. It's trying to run the assign application which creates temporary symbolic links to paths on disks so that the shell knows what to run. The fact that it's failing isn't good, but let's try work out why.

Firstly, where is this line even being called from? It turns out it's the startup-sequence in the s folder on the boot: disk, which happens to be the disk image we downloaded and booted from. We can use the type command to work out what's in this file...

Ok, so it's tried to mount the HDD on DH0:. It's then changed to it, and succeeded? It's then tried to run the assign application from the c folder on the HDD. Uh, there's nothing on this HDD... actually, I have no idea what's on it! Quick way to find out...

Uh, yeah.. that'll never work! The delete command will come in handy here... I went ahead and whacked each of those useless files. Sorry DOS! Note that I could have also formatted the partition at this point... I had tried to do so during this adventure, but I couldn't work out how to format it as FAT (or FAT32) from the Amiga. Whenever I formatted it, it came up as an unknown DOS disk... so I slapped it into a Windows PC and formatted it there.

That last image above shows the Mountlist file located in the devs/ folder. This is super important as it tells mount how to understand what each partition is. It's similar to the /etc/fstab in Unix. Above you can see that it would try to use the fat95 library located in the L folder. Hence, when I formatted it and it became an Amiga partition, the fat95 driver would then throw an error indicating it wasn't a DOS drive. I would still love to know how to fix this Mountlist after a format... what parameters do I need to give the rest instead of just the driver being FastFileSystem?

Anyway, we're getting lost... leave it as FAT and then run copy boot: DH0: to copy the contents of the bootdisk to the HDD. Once done, reboot!

Hmm... still the c/assign error? Switching to the disk saw that only the root files copied... is there a -R switch? Turns out I should have run the following: copy boot: DH0: ALL...

Cool! The next error!? It's trying to map a fonts folder? Checking the bootdisk, there is no such folder. Oh, right, the bootdisk doesn't actually have WB1.3 on it! It's just a booter to get WB1.3 running off the HDD. Go and purchase the Floppy & Hard Disk Image Pack from Amiga Forever, download the ADFs and get them onto your USB stick. Boot the machine with the IDE bootdisk, swap the ADF via the Gotek change disk button to WB1.3 and run the same copy, but this time with the differing drive name: copy workbench1.3: DH0: ALL

And reboot!

Holy moly... my HDD is visible! Note that this was tested on both a Kickstart 1.2 and Kickstart 1.3 Amiga 500! I quickly booted up SysInfo to see what the system specs were.

Yup, it's still a lowly A500. I no longer have any components for sale.

Finally, for more thorough instructions on IDE formatting, view the tutorial I've written over here.

Amiga 500 – Gotek

So, the goal was an internal IDE drive, but to do that I needed a boot disk as my A500 with Kickstart 1.2 would not auto-boot. To make it boot and find a HDD, I needed a floppy image written to a floppy disk. Of course, you can't write this with a standard PC drive; instead I either needed a bootable Workbench disk and serial magic (like what I did to the Apple II back in the day) to copy over floppy-copying-software, or just use a Gotek!

I happened to have a spare 'cheap' gotek that I've complained about before which deserved to be used for this hack and slashery.

Could I flash Amiga firmware to it? I don't have an FTDI USB device, but I have plenty of Arduinos! Firstly though, we'll need to allow data access to the Gotek. This means soldering on some pin-headers to the holes right behind the power plug.

Regarding using an Arduino, it's the internet, so someone has already done it. Wiring it up was pretty straight-forward: dedicate two pins to SoftSerial and then make sure the transmission line has a few resistors on it. The Gotek is TTL level, which means 3.3v data signals. As the Arduino puts out 5v, we need a 4.7k resistor between the TX pin and the gotek. Where the resistor meets your wire, also put a 10k resistor to ground.

Yup, you can't see shit because of my 'mood lighting'. The sketch on the Arduino was as follows:

#include <SoftwareSerial.h>
SoftwareSerial mySerial(10, 11); // RX, TX
void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  while (!Serial) {
    ; // wait for serial port to connect. Needed for native USB port only
  }
  mySerial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() { // run over and over
  if (mySerial.available()) {
    Serial.write(mySerial.read());
  }
  if (Serial.available()) {
    mySerial.write(Serial.read());
  }
}

Very simply, the code brings up the hardware port to 9600 baud and the same with the softserial port on pins 10 and 11. Pin 11 is TX and had the resistors, as mentioned above. The Gotek then needed 5v and GND from the Arduino. From there, you need to install the STM software and grab the Cortex hex image to flash. It's all in this blog post, with the downloads being at the very bottom.

I then unmounted the existing drive in the Amiga and swapped in the Gotek on a 3d-printed base that a friend (thanks Shouchan!) had made. Unfortunately, it seems to be for a newer revision of the A500? Or I'm mounting it wrong. Regardless, it all went in and the access light just stayed on when I booted the machine. No dice, just the usual Kickstart 1.2 screen asking for a floppy.

At this point, I could probably write a few extra paragraphs here on how I then went and tried FlashFloppy, to have that fail too. I thought I should then try HxC which also, after paying for it, ended up with the same error. So... I slept.

Testing out my 'better' Gotek

I had another Gotek (with display and buttons) that I've previously used in my IBM PCs and didn't really want to hack apart. My assumption was that the 'fake' one above with no display or buttons couldn't handle the 3rd-party firmware and this just had to work!

I did the usual... soldered on the header and programmed it.

This time I used the USB Serial adapter from Jaycar that I'd bought above to get HxC to burn. It wouldn't work via the Arduino as the baud rate needs to be 115200 and the Arduino can't 'pipe' this through quick enough! Anyway, as you can see above, I flashed it and still got the standard 'insert disk' screen. What am I doing wrong!? I then looked at the actual Gotek, which now had a beautiful error on display...

Ah crap... remember back in the day with standard floppy drives... how when you had the ribbon cable backwards, they'd just stay lit up (or even make a horrid repetitive searching noise)!? Amiga drives do this too. Better yet, when a Gotek (with a display) has the ribbon cable backwards, it'll tell you with a rib warning!

All this time spent above was a total waste as I'd just had the cable backwards the whole time. To me, the cable was actually forwards, as pin 1 matched pin 1 on both ends... but it turns out you need to flip it on the Gotek side. I'm sure this information is written in a manual somewhere?

A quick flip of the cable and...

Hoy polloy... I've learnt a lot... have a bit of new usb-serial hardware, and two dismantled Goteks. So, I then purchased the original Workbench disks from Amiga Forever (USD$9.95 for just the floppy images!) and threw the ADFs on the USB drive.

Ah. Nice! Time to give this thing an internal IDE HDD.

Commodore 1084S Monitor Power Switch

As per usual, I saw an auction on eBay and thought I'd have a crack. It happened to be 3 Amiga 500s with a lot of paraphernalia. Included, if I picked it up personally, was a beautiful Commodore 1084S monitor, with a faulty power switch.

After a quick message to a good friend in the Amiga community (thanks Steve!), I had a link to a fellow Australian's anonymous blog on blogspot under the name Random Mayhem. Here's the link to the article, but it seems to have disappeared in the time that I've now come around to writing this post. I picked everything up mid-february, got around to purchasing the items soon after... but now two weeks later the blog is gone! Thankfully, here's the cached version from Google. I have no idea how long that'll be around.

Thankfully, the whole process is very straightforward. First up you'll need to buy a replacement switch from Wagner Electronics Super Store in Sydney. From here, we make minor mods to the switch, as it now has a secondary pole, and then swap it in.

Opening up the Monitor

CRT Monitor contain high voltages, which can be stored for long periods of time. BE CAREFUL! Yes, the usual warning. The large capacitors in CRT monitors will hold charge and need to be discharged if the monitor has been on recently. Grab an insulated flat-head screwdriver and bridge the pins on any capacitor. If you get a spark out of it, then you've probably just saved that spark from travelling through your finger.

There's around 6 screws to remove to take the main housing off. From here, don't pull it away with speed. There are two speakers in the housing and these are connected by relatively-loose cables that run to the front-left of the monitor, where the headphone jack is. You'll need to lift the housing around 5cm off the chassis and then unplug these two cables. Once done, you can remove the housing completely.

From here, give the internals a good clean-up... my unit sure did need it!

Removing the existing switch

The switch is held in with 6 pins: 4 electrical contacts and two for the support bracket. Removing it will involve removing the solder from the pins and then 'walking' the switch out. The basic idea of 'walking' is to heat up the pins on one side of the switch and prise it up as high as possible, only moving it millimetres at a time. From here, heat up and loosen the pins at the other end and prise that up. Once you've got one end clear of the solder pads, heating up the other end should see the whole switch come out.

With the switch out, we can now remove the support bracket. This is held in by two bent tabs on the top side. Grab a set of reverse pliers, the ones that open when squeezed, and slowly bend the top pins open. We want to re-use this support bracket, so try not to snap the tabs off! They should bend relatively easily. Test if you can wriggle the switch vertically out of the bracket each time to prevent opening up the tabs too much. Too much flexing of the tabs could weaken and see them tear off.

With everything apart, we can now install the new switch.

Modifying and installing the new switch

First up, you need to cut off the three pins on the new model. We don't need these on our old monitor. I grabbed my sharpest pair of pliers and cut the tabs off right at the base. I suppose you could use them for a mod if you wanted? LED lighting? an extra amp for the speakers? I had no use though.

Once done, you can slide the support bracket on and gently bend the tabs back into position. The whole switch will then slide perfectly into the previous switch's position. If not, just make sure all the solder holes are clean. Once in place, solder away!

Re-assembling the housing

Just a quick note here... make sure you run the speaker cables correctly. One runs internally around the entirety of the housing so as to keep it from electrical interference produced by the circuitry. I assume there's also heat concerns, so make sure it's not running too close the to main tube. There are actually little plastic tabs where you can push the cable into, to keep it in position when you push the housing onto the chassis.

Also, when plugging the cables back in, make sure you have them the right way around. You wrote down the order, didn't you? Or did you take a photo prior!?

Testing... or... please keep the magic smoke in!

I bit the bullet and just applied power and video data. Thankfully, I got a Kickstart 1.2 boot screen! I knew the Amiga already worked, as I'd tested the black-and-white composite out. I was very happy to see this crispy screen come to life.

As you can see... it was time to load A-Train, which I'd bought whilst I had the A1200, but which had arrived after I'd sold the A1200.

A-Train disks on the Amiga

A quick note here... if you look at the final photo above, you'll notice A-Train is asking for 'Disk 2'.

Uh... 'Disk 2'? I'd booted off 'Lo-res', so I slapped in 'Hi-res'. It worked, but the disk naming is terrible. Nowhere on those disks is the number 1 or 2?

Monitor built-in stand

Just in-case you didn't notice, there's a built-in stand in the base of the monitor. The stand consists of two plates of plastic that are hinged to provide a triangular stand, supporting the rear of the monitor. This is specifically to be used when the front half of the monitor is sitting on the rear edge of your Amiga.

It's actually very handy. Without it, the angle that the monitor sits at would put severe pressure on any cable plugged into the back.