The Gotek drive
Yesterday, we talked about floppy disks so let’s talk about one of the solutions to dealing with them: The Gotek.
Now, this is not the only device of its kind but since it is the one I own, I’m going to focus on it. They can be purchased pretty readily around the internet, just have a look. I suggest buying from either an Amiga vendor or an individual with some experience in Amiga matters just to support the community ecosystem. The drives are cheap: 40 USD or so at the time of writing and it works with your existing cables, though if you want to use it externally you may have to do a bit of research as far as what cables you need.
What it does is basically replace your floppy drive. It connects with the floppy drive cable exactly like the real drive and as far as your Amiga is concerned, it IS a real Amiga floppy drive: Full compatibility, everything loads exactly as intended.
However, instead of fiddling with disks you are simply loading up a USB stick with ADF’s (disk images of Amiga floppies). You use two buttons on the front of the drive to switch between the selected images and the Amiga then reads it exactly as if it was a real disk. This means original loading speed too, so its as slow as it was in 1992 but hey. It does mean that the game loads authentically and correctly. Im sure somewhere in the history of Amiga software, some unique piece of software exists which, for some reason, cannot be loaded on the Gotek but I’ve tried with a bunch of stuff and it all works great.
This is especially handy as many newer Amiga releases are distributed as ADFs directly. Just put them on your card and you are ready to go.
This also helps solve the issue I talked about with the Amiga 500: That it is otherwise fairly difficult to get software you have downloaded to the computer. With the Gotek, its easy as pie.
One word of warning: The Gotek is a bit too tall for use as the internal drive in a “wedge case” Amiga (500, 500 plus, 600, 1200). You can buy ones that have been modified to fit or you can remove some of the casing, otherwise the case won’t close.
All in all, I highly recommend a Gotek to almost any Amiga user. It’s easy to use and you will not want to go back to fiddling with physical disks again.
