jmtd → log → amiga → oled → Internal Gotek

This is the eleventh part in a series of blog posts. The previous post was FlashFloppy OLED display. The whole series is available here: Amiga.

It's still mostly all quiet on the Amiga project front. The last few months with both my kids at home have been too difficult and busy with no time for side projects. Primary Schools in the UK went back this week, and I've finally got around to installing the Gotek floppy emulator inside the Amiga A500's chassis.

I followed A short "Internal Gotek Floppy" Installation Guide , which explains that you don't need to print (or buy) a special mount for it: Simply removing the Gotek's top plastic case is enough for it to fit inside, and you can support it with some nuts and bolts.

Gotek bolted into place

Easy in theory, but it still took me a while, with plenty of trial and error to line it up just right. I ended up using some M4 bolts and smaller (the kind that you use in electrical sockets) to support the bottom part of the Gotek case in three places: one, at the front, re-using an original vertical support for the old floppy drive; and two at the back, screwing through two holes in the A500's outer case and mainboard. If I'd chosen short enough bolts, the back of the Gotek case could have probably just rested on the ends of those bolts, but the ones I had were another few cm longer, so I drilled holes in the Gotek case to run the bolts through, and secured it with nuts.

Knob, display and mount, external

In that guide, the author has an OLED display for their Gotek that they wanted on the top of the Amiga case, so they fed the four tiny wires through the grill. I had a go at that, but I've got the OLED display and a rotary encoder, so that's 8 wires total, and damn fiddly. Instead for now I've just routed them all out through the hole left behind by the floppy drive's Button. I'm going to try and tidy it up with some heat shrink or similar.

So finally, my Amiga is one "unit" again, without dangly bits hanging off it (if you ignore those 8 tiny wires for now) that I can move around to store or use much more easily.