Making A Great Working Chinon FZ-506 Floppy Drive Interface For Reading Amiga 5.25 Inch Floppies
Although this article probably not falls in the category repair, it definitely is always about making something work! And this document will explain how to make a +30 year old 5.25 inch PC Chinon FZ- 506 floppy disk drive read & write those old Amiga 5.25 floppies. And whats best about it all is that the drive even copies the copy protected ones! At that time here those 5.25 floppies were used to make cheaper copies instead of using those expensive 3.5 diskettes. Both now sadly no longer are manufactured. And prices asked these days for old second hand used Commodore computers or the 3.5 inch diskettes and 5.25 inch floppies are often berserk! For instance a used Commodore CD32 now often has a pricetag of around 400 euros! Recently my CD32 console needed a new laser head which nowadays is cheaply available for about 6 euro from China. But that repair/fix already can be read online after a search on how to proceed in replacing the likely Sony laser head.
Me being a crazy old Commodore C64 and Amiga lover/fan (crazy probably not, but old I suppose fits the bill?) still think they revolutionized the computer world! And even today those many many games, utilities and do not forget the fantastic demos, with superfast graphics and fantastic stereo sound are often a great joy to watch and hear! Programming demos that still amaze because of the multi dedicated processors in each Amiga for sound, video and processing.
Most of those now all free, and even many of those old disk images, CD-rom images , and also computer magazines are now downloadable on Archive.org. (Sadly they recently had a sudden lockdown because they suffered from some stupid hackergroup after some Ddos attack).
But enough on the intro and lets begin explaining how to make the old (but now also quite expensive!) Chinon PC floppy FZ-506 diskdrive read those 5.25 inch Amiga floppy backups.
Most of making this work was only possible because of the great work already done by Rob Smith in the UK who made a cheap Arduino Floppy disk interface that originally only was made for those 3.5 inch PC floppy drives to interface with any PC over USB. See here => Drawbridge:
https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk His project is now advanced to DrawBridge PLUS!
And probably no one had made this interface running on a old 5.25 PC floppydrive yet, and Rob had no info about this when I asked him about it.
But today after hours of long fiddling with the 13! Jumpers on the top board side of the Chinon drive I finally could read a 5.25 Amiga floppy disk 100% failure free! Finding the right jumper settings was mainly possible because of the super diagnostic tool that Rob in the past had added into his Drawbridge Windows program. That at first showed that the drive speed was running at 360 RPM instead of the needed 300 RPM for reading Amiga 80 tracks floppies. The adf image of the 100% errorfree read 5.25 disk worked great when tested in the Windows WinUAE Amiga emulator! I emailed this fantastic result to Rob who was happy to hear about it!
On the following photo the solderside of the Chinon top board with on the left the 13 jumpers is shown after removing the top metal plate. This originally PC only floppydrive had mini jumpers on positions 1,3,10 and 13. Being TERM, Drive1 select,MS and DSC (diskchange). But that setting never worked for Amiga!
To get more info on how any 5.25 inch Amiga floppy drive select its tracks between 40 and 80 tracks I also opened my original perfectly working 5.25 inch TEAC FD-55 GFR floppydrive. And noticed they had added a single pole changeover toggle switch connected by 2 wires going to /MX and pin 18 of a Sharp IC marking 2207-00 IR4N10 . Of which no datasheet could be found on the internet. And since my Chinon drive used other chips like the M51784P controller (motor chip) that was no real help.
On the left of both jumpers 8 and 9 they are grounded (shown with a ‘[‘ symbol]. The right jumper pin of jumper position 8 is the bottom Via at text R22.
The right jumper pin of jumper position 9 is the top Via above text R22.
PS: Apparently a 40-80 track switch was connected with its blue ground wire to right jumper position 9 on modified Chinon FZ-506 drives that were in use with BBC micro users. These are the chips that can be found on this board:
1 x Toshiba TA 8515F (4 x 11 pins)
1 x TC 8607F
1 x 74HC4066 (quad bilateral single poleswitch)
1 x 74LS486
1 x LS00
1 x LS04
1 x 74LS123(dual retriggerable monostable multivibrators with clear
for exact timing pulse length)
1 x TD 952 62003F
Next photos show these ic’s:
In short,I had a hard time figuring out the jumper settings of the 13 tiny jumpers on the left side of the Chinon drive topboard. But set as DD in Drawbridge it now perfectly errorfree reads all 80 tracks on my Windows 10 second hand Lenovo 430s laptop. Hereby a big warning NOT to connect an external 5V onto the USB port of your computer and to the FTDI board to prevent blowing up your computer port!
Therefore just disable the 5V jumper on your FTDI board so only that module gets its power from the usb port. And only connect the external 5V to the Arduino mini pro module and to the 5.25 molex input of the drive. Rob’s Drawbridge (Windows 10 and later) Amiga floppy reader/writer program as mentioned also copies protected diskettes AND also saves them into the SCP image format (by reading the entire disk as magnetic stored data!).
But Drawbridge now also copies Atari ST and MS-Dos PC diskettes! Last but not least Rob also added another free Windows program named DiskFlashBack that automatically reads any inserted disk/floppy into Windows and shows them as mounted A: drive! He even designed both conflict free so that when Drawbridge already is opened it will close DiskFlashBack not to interfere.
For that the Diskchange drive function must be working which on a PC drive normally never is working/ or used! For the moment I am out of those mini jumpers to add one at jumper position DSC which normally would activate the Diskchange signal on my Chinon drive according to the Chinon datasheet.
Above photo shows my good old Chinon FZ-506 floppydrive.
Below photo shows again the Arduino mini pro module (blue board)connected on the left to the FTDI module on the right (red module).
Both are very affordable and together make world’s cheapest universal diskdrive controller!
Above page shows the Chinon jumper (short plug) settings. On next photo the already working mini jumper setting for Amiga floppies positions 1,3,6,8, and 11 with 12 are occupied. Followed by a screen copy that shows the DrawBridge PLUS Windows program in action reading the inserted 80 tracks 5/25 inch Amiga floppy. And the end rapport that showed that the floppy was 100% error free and saved as adf file successfully!
However jumper 12 was later on set to position 13 because the RDY state inhibited a working here needed Disk change signal!
By the red wire from VCC on the Arduino Pro module on next photos, only the Mini pro Arduino module and the drive on its Molex are fed by the externally connected 5V power supply. Of course the drive also is fed by an external 12V on its 4 pin molex input port for the drive to work. (both about max 1A DC according to the label).
And for safety reasons as mentioned only the FTDI board is directly connected to the 5V from the USB PC port with its + and – datalines. (by disabling the 5V jumper through jumper on the FTDI module! Also because the 5.25 drive would draw way too much current for its 5V molex input).
Shown in next photos is the 34 pin wired flatcable female shugartbus floppy edge-connector that I made after my second now 5.25 interface was ready (after previous working 3.5 inch version). With all ground (oneven)wires bundled to one wire for connection to the ground (0V)GND pin(s) of the Arduino and FTDI floppy interface. Followed by a Chinon FZ-506 schematic that I completely unexpectedly found online.
Click on the above diagram to enlarge
Thanks to jumper 13 DSC setting any new floppy automatically gets read and mounted into Windows as A: drive everytime a floppy change is detected by the great working Windows DiskFlashBack program!
Previous photo showed the 330 ohm 1% pullup resistor that connected edge connector ‘pin’2 to the external 5V so that the drive was running exactly at 300 RPM with a maximum capacity of 1MB of store data.(see jumpersetting in the table on page paragraph 9 above).
Below screencopy made by Raimond Spekking shows the many components that are used in the Chinon FZ-506 5.25 inch Floppy drive.
The best feature of Rob’s Amiga Floppy reader project is that any new detected 5.25 inch floppy (or any 3.5 inch disk) immediately gets mounted as A:, or any other next free drive after that, by the DiskFlashBack program and they also can be opened in Windows like it was a real Windows disk. Even the already copied and saved to harddisk Amiga adf images can be mounted and opened this way. Which is extraordinary to say the least! And when you have the Amiga Emulator WinUAE Windows program installed and running all your copied or mounted floppy images can be run easily this way!
Previously shown the already 3D printed 5.25 inch sturdy protective case in Petg to house the 5.25 floppy drive -including the here used Arduino Floppy controller- in. It exactly fitted the Chinon drive right after it was printed in about 7,5 hours => I used this Thingiverse file: 5.25_ Optical DVD Drive Enclosure – 3803538. The stl file without any name on its case top.
And to conclude this article here a last photo of the Chinon drive label on the back of the sturdy frame.
Because Rob Smith’s great Arduino diskdrive interface project originated its design especially intended for Amiga 3.5 inch DD 80 track diskettes this means that 40 track disks or floppies are not yet supported in the Arduino ino file and the Drawbridge Windows program or in DiskFlashback.
The here used Chinon drive is a special dual speed drive supporting both 300 and 360 RPM speeds. And this HD 1.2MB 80 tracks floppydrive no doubt can be set to 40 tracks too. (which installed in a PC normally was selected and done in the Bios setup). That is why it is perfectly capable in synchronizing with the Drawbridge and DiskFlashback software programs similar to 3.5 inch diskettes for 3.5 inch drives that also are 80 track drives.
As was mentioned Rob enhanced his fabulous project afterwards so it now also supports the Atari ST and IBM 3.5 inch 1.44MB diskettes that also are 80 tracks, and therefore also can be read and written on a standard 3.5 inch PC diskdrive. So the present Arduino Floppydrive hardware interface works excellent if your drive is a standard good old 3.5 inch PC floppydisk drive.
In future the Drawbridge and DiskFlashback programs can be enhanced further to also support for instance the standard IBM 360KB 360 rpm, and C64/128 5.25 inch floppy disks.
But for the moment Rob does not support those 40 tracks floppies from 5.25 inch floppydrives in his project yet! This is however likely not a limitation of Rob’s present Arduino floppydrive usb controller that easily can be used for 40 Tracks floppies and diskettes with other rpm speeds too.
Warning! Rob also mentions on his website not to use other serial to usb modules than FTDI modules. Those must be avoided because they will fail working! (CH340 and other ic’s are probably too slow or give sync problems somehow).
Those modules that were ordered from Aliexpress in the past sadly didn’t work. The FTDI modules ordered from eBay were however working perfectly!
Although not clearly mentioned… Drawbridge also works perfectly in Windows 7-32bit too! DiskFlashback however only works in Windows10/11-64bit!
I’m sure that the many retro computer enthousiasts – and in particular the Commodore and Amiga users – will love to read about this new possibility to use an old 5.25 floppy drive on todays new usb connected computers! Or to make this excellent affordable Arduino diskdrive controller for a standard 1.44MB PC diskdrive using 3.5 inch diskettes.
I hereby thank Robert Smith (RobSmithDev) for even making this previously unknown but now also perfectly working Amiga 5.25 inch floppydrive option possible!
* Also a very short about 31 second videoclip of this great working Chinon 5.25 inch floppydrive reading an Amiga 5.25 inch floppy can be viewed here (was taken yesterday at night so is a bit blurry because my camera needed more light to focus):
Albert van Bemmelen, Weert, The Netherlands.
Please give a support by clicking on the social buttons below. Your feedback on the post is welcome. Please leave it in the comments.
P.S- If you enjoyed reading this, click here to subscribe to my blog (free subscription). That way, you’ll never miss a post. You can also forward this website link to your friends and colleagues-thanks!
Note: You can read his previous article on Fixed short in Salora 22 inch TV
(26)Dislikes
(0)
21 Comments
Leave a Reply
pa l
November 9, 2024 at 2:30 am
Love Amiga from another long time user
Albert van Bemmelen
November 9, 2024 at 4:31 pm
The world of fascinating computer games for me began with the VIC-20 and rom packs playing Invaders and other 2D games like Pacman.
But at home my father first had bought a one coloured TRS-80 with only 14K of internal ram that hardly was any fun of course (which I however still keep somewhere because it was our father's computer). Soon followed by the C64 that was extremely more fun with games such as David Midnight's Magic Pinball.
Recently I made 3 brandnew PI1541's (run by Raspberry Pi's as core) that exactly emulate and work like real 1541 floppydrives but use small SD cards instead with C64 D64 or T64 disk and tape images on them.
And for my old Amiga 2000 computers I bought affordable ready build AT 2008 Zorro II IDE/CD-ROM slot cards from the Dutch Amiga Gotek retro shop that autoboot the Amiga from CF cards. This one: https://gotek.nl/amiga-at-bus-2008-clone/
Of course I am now very spoiled also owning a Commodore XBOX and a XBOX360 after playing many of those 3D world games like Halo or Riddick. But often the old 2D games still attract to play them again once in a while. Like a rather unknown Amiga game that is called ZUES that is very entertaining!
Albert van Bemmelen
November 12, 2024 at 2:31 am
Oops: Correction the game is called ZEUS.
This one here => https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=3964
Mark J
November 9, 2024 at 3:50 am
Albert great article. I am a Commodore C64 and Amiga lover also.
Albert van Bemmelen
November 9, 2024 at 3:36 pm
I have no doubt that many more retro computer lovers do love these Commodore computers Mark J!
Good to know is that whenever a new firmware update gets published we just connect the powered up Arduino interface to any computer and simply upload the new firmware with Arduino IDE to our over usb connected Amiga Floppydisk controller! All done and ready in just a matter of seconds!
Parasuraman S
November 9, 2024 at 1:19 pm
I threw away 5.25" and 3.25" floppies recently to scrap as it was occupying too much of space! The article and its subject is beyond me and even though I tried to read through, I gave up half way through as all went above my head!
Nevertheless, the article is very elaborate and might find extremely useful who work on these antique disks!
Albert van Bemmelen
November 9, 2024 at 3:24 pm
Sorry to hear that Parasuraman. Probably because you never had used any Amiga or other Commodore computer why you never had any reason to keep those.
I guess it is what a waste is for some... is a treasure for others (;).
Recently I bought 40 of those almost 30 year old 3.5 inch diskettes that still work like it was yesterday! Something I can't say of several usb memory sticks that suddenly stopped working and weren't fixable without the replacement controller chip or matching nand memory chip.
Japan just recently stopped this year using the still very actively been used diskettes.
Waleed Rishmawi
November 9, 2024 at 5:33 pm
alhtough the article is well written and organized but to be honest it is beyond me and over my head. thanks for sharing and have a blessed day
Albert van Bemmelen
November 10, 2024 at 1:00 am
Have a blessed weekend Waleed!
Mark J
November 10, 2024 at 4:33 am
Albert I never knew you had a youtube channel. I will have to check it out.
Albert van Bemmelen
November 10, 2024 at 4:34 pm
Everyone can upload a video to Youtube Mark J!
Nothing to it. And it is free too!
Mark J
November 12, 2024 at 8:39 am
Albert I know that. I meant that I did not know that you specifically had a youtube channel.
Albert van Bemmelen
November 12, 2024 at 7:09 am
For those readers who also like to build this fantastic quite universal Floppy Disk controller from Rob Smith don't be afraid because it is easily made and may be cheap but always works!
But know that there also are other Diskette/floppy-controller projects like this one called The FluxEngine. See here =>
https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/building.html
and here =>
https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine
Also this FluxEngine project is a very interesting Floppy Controller project that works with almost any floppy or diskette - even the ones you are not familiar with ! - on practically any 3.5 inch or 5.25 inch diskdrive. But it sadly uses a completely different controller chip that assumably momentary is out of stock and the those chipcontroller prices have gone up accordingly also. But if you have that board with all parts programmed and completed it will even read many more disks and floppies according to the designer(s).
Mark J
November 12, 2024 at 8:39 am
Albert I know that. I meant that I did not know that you specifically had a youtube channel.
Albert van Bemmelen
November 12, 2024 at 2:58 pm
I never made a Youtube channel intentionally Mark J, as far as I am aware of?
But I guess it looks that way after having uploaded several videos also from previous articles.
I myself however always prefer reading and downloading pdf documents because they take less time to examine and often contain all information in a printable form. And videos often only show the results of the made projects and tests.
Albert van Bemmelen
November 14, 2024 at 6:11 pm
Here I think a very interesting tip I found out, for Gamers & Commodore computer owners/users, to test Joysticks and Amiga mouses or even PS2 PC mouses with this hardware =>
https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/Atari_Joystick_Tester.html
https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/AMIGA_PS_2_MOUSE_CONVERTER__ADAPTER____PIC16F628_A__1.html
Testing PS2 mouses works by using first the PS2-to-Amiga- mouse-adapter plugged in into the Joystick tester. And Amiga mouses directly plug in into the Joystick tester.
It works great to be able to test Joysticks and Commodore/Atari or PC mouses without any computer connected!
Albert van Bemmelen
November 14, 2024 at 6:22 pm
And by using a green USB-to-PS2 adapter plugged in also some of the USB mice (those supporting PS/2 communication protocols) can be tested with this Joystick tester!
Yogesh Panchal
November 16, 2024 at 12:21 am
Albert,
Never heard of Amiga or other Commodore, i entered the field of computer in 1993 era of XT 8088 X86 machine & used lots of 16 BIT IDE IO Cards for assembling the machines.
Albert van Bemmelen
November 16, 2024 at 4:29 pm
I have many of those -mostly desktop and other Windows 95 upto Windows 11- computers too Yogesh. But they never were as much fun as the first 8/16 bit computers C64/128 and Amiga after them. The old Windows 95 mini tower computer I still have has a special VESA Local Bus mainboard (was a short-lived expansion bus introduced during the i486 generation computers) that still drives my electronics IC-tester slotcard with Eprom reader and GAL reader/writer that only install and work on that mainboard. But it also runs a special CD drive that can rewrite special rewritable CD-ROM discs in a caddy over 50.000 times (but that probably was just a questional selling argument that only is true as long as the laser head is still functional). Sadly these older Windows computers nowadays - even the still good working ones ! - are thrown away simply because most of them no longer are capable to go online with their older Windows pre-7 versions and their too old unsafe browsers that no longer support it! And even if the date and time no longer matches the actual time -when the RTC lithium battery runs out on our good working mainboards- our browsers prevent going online for security reasons and we no longer can connect with the internet because our browsers prevent that.
Albert van Bemmelen
November 16, 2024 at 6:16 pm
Addendum: Although 3.5 inch diskdrives also have a Density Select pin2 on the 34-pin Shugart bus Floppydrive connector it was clearly not connected in Rob's schematic in the article. So it is not used and HighDensity or DoubleDensity disks have to be selected manually in the Drawbridge screen menu. Oddly however is that pin2 clearly was mentioned on Rob's Amiga Floppydrive Drawbridge webpage going to be connected to the mini Pro Arduino module pin A3!
But I didn't use or needed that connection in my Chinon FZ-506 project. And neither used it in my other perfectly working 3.5 inch Floppy drive interface.
And any PC 3.5 inch floppy drive can also simply be made a direct replacement Amiga DF0: drive by removing the DS1: solder jumper by setting it to DS0:. Plus by removing the 000 (zero ohm) DC resistor and place it on the open RDY resistor position instead, so RDY is grounded to gnd (uneven odd pins 1 to 33). And add a wire connection from the now removed previous top DC resistor position (on my drive pin 26 on a SEMEN SF12H021A chip) going to pin 2 of the 34 pin shugart bus floppyconnector.
Albert van Bemmelen
November 16, 2024 at 7:49 pm
More info on changing most known 3.5 inch original PC drives into Amiga drives can be found in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajA_JkMNTVc