Gotek Amiga Drive

Well, well, well, finally I got one of those Gotek USB floppy simulators, that you can get everywhere nowadays. With a little knowledge, software and a flasher/programmer you can even turn it into a nice replacement for the old Amiga drives. I got one that was ready to use with an Amiga from ebay for a few quid. The thing that I did not have on my checklist: It does not fit into an A500 without cutting the case and that is something I can’t stand. There might be millions of A500 out there, but it is still no excuse, to cut down and cripple the case beyond repair.

My first idea was to design a little box, that would snap into the ventilation grill, right above the Amiga logo, but my first 3D printed attempt did not fit quite right and showed impressively how shitty this will look in the end. So, how to get the buttons and the segment display out of the case, without cutting wholes? I settled on a sort of crazy idea of hacking a floppy disk, that would protude out of the floppy slot and would encase the display and the two buttons that are needed to operate the drive. Well, those elements are tripple the hight of a normal 3,5″ floppy and it took me some time till I found a solution to this. Using Forex (gatorboard) from our trash container at work, an excato-knife and some patience, I managed to stack up a thick floppy disk,, that pokes out of the drive and houses the needed controls. Instead of cutting down the original Gotek case, I choose to just make a new board that the PCB can be screwed to and that would just fit into the original drive mount. The two tiny buttons were sourced from an old DVD Player that was in the electro trashbin at work, leaving me with some PCB that is good for mounting. Although the buttons are not that high and rather vanish in the holes you can operate them with the fingernail quite easily – keeps the whole look of the disk clean and nice.

Things to do:
– drilling further wholes and add LEDs
– solder the wires and plugs
– glueing everything together
– pray that this all will withstand traveling to HomeCon and the like 😉