Gaming: Multiple floppy disk games
Other than the simplest games, most games come on more than one floppy disk. Some came on quite a few disks: The most I owned was Historyline 1914–18 which came on 7 disks and my friend’s copy of Beneath a Steel Sky had a huge stack of them.
Let’s take a minute to talk about disk basics for the Amiga: The “default” Amiga disk is a DD (Double Density) disk formatted at 880 KB. These are not readable in a PC floppy drive.
HD (High Density) floppies require a special drive, but to my knowledge no software came on these. I remember reading about them and wanting one, so you could store more DeluxePaint stuff on a disk.
Various information, often contradictory, can be found online about using HD disks in a regular Amiga drive. All I can say from personal experience is that on an A1200, I have never had an issue formatting these as 880 KB disks and using them. I never had any data loss issues either.
However, back in the day, I do remember having to format disks for a friend with an A500 before he could use them. I’m not sure what the reason was.
You can still get boxes of floppy disks online fairly readily, factory sealed. Just look around Ebay or specialist suppliers, they’re not usually expensive either.
Dealing with floppies of course requires a disk drive. Every Amiga comes with one, labelled DF0 in the system. You can attach up to three additional drives labelled DF1 through DF3. External drives usually have a port in the back that allows the next drive to be connected into it, daisy-chain style.
Do note that on a system with limited RAM, external drives do eat up a small amount of memory. It was not typical to have more than one external drive but it is something that is worth bearing in mind.
Dealing with games on floppy disk can come with some headaches: Many (most?) games play nice and work with multiple drives, allowing you to insert a couple disks and thus cut down on swapping. However, some only allow the use of a single drive. Some even require the use of the internal drive which can be a challenge if you have a defective drive. Then of course you have the games that (presumably due to copy protection schemes) would make the drive sound like a robot choking to death. Good times.
What do you need if you are getting into the Amiga now and want to use actual floppies? (We’ll talk about other solutions in future posts such as floppy drive emulators, mounting disk images in Workbench and using WHDLoad).
First, make sure your machines internal drive is actually working. If not, you will run into difficulties with some games.
Second, get yourself an external drive so you have two. More than that is probably not needed as games coming on 4+ disks were often hard-drive installable. A second drive was one of the most common upgrades at the time and they show up on ebay (and similar sites) often enough.
Third, if you have a way to transfer disk images to the Amiga, seek out software that lets you write disk images to floppies (such as AmigaKits “Easy ADF”). This will let you create your own floppies instead of having to ebay for stacks of old, often defective disks.
