jmtd → log → amiga → Amiga/Gotek boot test

This is the fourth part in a series of blog posts. The previous post was part 3: preliminaries. The next post is glitched Amiga video. The whole series is available here: Amiga.

A500 mainboard

In 2015 Game 2.0, a Retro Gaming exhibition visited the Centre for Life in Newcastle. On display were a range of vintage home computers and consoles, rigged up so you could play them. There was a huge range of machines, including some Arcade units and various (relatively) modern VR systems that were drawing big crowds but something else caught my attention: a modest little Amiga A500, running the classic puzzle game, "Lemmings".

A couple of weeks ago I managed to disassemble my Amiga and remove the broken floppy disk drive. The machine was pretty clean under the hood, considering its age. I fed new, longer power and data ribbon cables out of the floppy slot in the case (in order to attach the Gotek Floppy Emulator externally) and re-assembled it.

Success! Lemmings!

I then iterated a bit with setting up disk images and configuring the firmware on the Gotek. It was supplied with FlashFloppy, a versatile and open source firmware that can operate in a number of different modes and read disk images in a variety of formats. I had some Amiga images in "IPF" format, others in "ADF" and also some packages with "RP9" suffixes. After a bit of reading around, I realised the "IPF" ones weren't going to work, the "RP9" ones were basically ZIP archives of other disk images and metadata, and the "ADF" format was supported.

Amiga & peripherals on my desk

For my first boot test of the Gotek adaptor, the disk image really had to be Lemmings. Success! Now that I knew the hardware worked, I spent some time re-arranging my desk at home, to try and squeeze the Amiga, its peripherals and the small LCD monitor alongside the equipment I use for my daily work. It was a struggle but they just about fit.

The next step was to be planning out and testing a workflow for writing to virtual floppies via the Gotek. Unfortunately, before I could get as far as performing the first write test, my hardware developed a problem…