HCX in External Amiga Floppy pics / Issue

[Info-Seeker]

Hey Guys,

This saturday was a great day for me. Finally, after a month of waiting, my USB HCX board showed up here.

This board made it all the way here from a far off land... Over Land, Sea and Air; Across multiple continents, and 2 separate mail carriers, DHL and the US Post office. It made it half way around the world, but the US Post Office couldn't make it the last 30 yards from my MailBox to my house. So I had to go pick it up at their office... God this country is great... You can get screwed so many different ways here, yet prostitution is illegal..

Anyways, After I paid the Post office $3.46 postage due, a small price to pay after a month of waiting, I finally got it home to check out. Thanks to my good friend Sven in Germany, it arrived in pristine shape, Perfect in every aspect! Rock on Sven. Very nice Packing Job!

I have many Amigas here. 2 disktop 1200s, 5 towers, 7 2000s, 3 1000s, 2 3000s and 1 4000 toaster, along with 4 or 5 500s. I had a hard time deciding which Amiga to connect up my Emulator to, but finally settled on a desktop 1200 for its first mission! With all the Amigas, I wanted the HCX to be portable so I could just move it between each Amiga.

I took some nice pix of it connected up to my 1200. I also took a few pics of the software running on a nice touchscreen tablet I use with 64HDD Pro on my Commodore 128. It worked perfect for the HCX, allowing me to drag and drop disk images with the stylus.. a very nice feature! here are some of the pix...

http://www.digirock.net/commodore/Ami_Floppy_Emu/

The unit worked great right out of the box. It fit in the external case perfect, so I put 4 standoffs in the mounting holes and screwed it down in the case. Took all of about 5 mins to put together... it actually took longer to find the standoffs!

I hang out in #Amiga on EfNet with some great guys. I missed the Amiga scene coming up, so a few years ago I decided to get some miggys and relive part of my miss spent youth. The guys there have been really awesome, and a lot of help! While talking with them and showing them pics, I realized I would have a problem booting NDos games off an external drive. While most images booted off DF1 if I used the 1200's boot menu to make df1 bootable, once they kicked in, they would die or try to load off df0. So out of the 50+ images I tried, only a few got all the way to letting me play..

as you can imagine, I was a bit disappointed. After looking around, I found that the 400 has a jumper, j249 I believe, to swap df0 from the internal to external floppy port. But the 1200, and 500 do not. I haven't checked the 1000 or 3000 yet.

So I am trying to find some docs or pics on how to connect up a switch on the 500, 1000, 1200, 2000, and 3000s that will allow me to swap df0 and df1 so df0 will work through the external db23 on the Amigas. I have read a few places about the hack, but can not find enough information to make it happen.

If any of you know how to do this, it would be greatly appreciated. It would make the HCX perfect! It will also come in handy when the stand alone versions drop. Yes it is great to have the HCX on 1 Amiga, but making it portable and work with Every Amiga is the Ultimate! I can not think of anything else that could make this project better. So if anyone knows how to do any of these hacks, has diagrams, pics, pinouts or anything else helpful for this mod, I would be forever in your debt.

Thanks again for making this great part! It is truly amazing and extremely easy to use! It also looks totally awesome in an external 3.5 enclosure! I can not wait for the stand alone version!

Thanks!

Info-Seeker