Back in the mists of time, in the previous century, I bought a computer, an Amiga A4000/030

I brought it home the day that news of Kurt Cobain’s death hit the news, April 1994. It was an upgrade from my A500.

I used it for many things, lots of computer graphics stuff, lots of video. It got a new processor, it got an animation recorder card, it got several hard disks.

Then it died. The power supply wasn’t particularly strong to start with and I’d been pushing it a bit past where I should have. There was bitter, acrid smoke, and all the breakers in the house tripped. Catastrophic failure.

A PC AT style power supply was quickly pressed into service. The motherboard plugs cut off and an amiga 6 pin molex grafted on.

So “Dogfood” was born – christened when a friend remarked that all the giblets were hanging out, just like dogfood.

Ideally, I would have done a better job of PSU replacement. The top of the case didn’t fit any longer, so Dogfood spent a few years sat on a set of drawers underneath a worktop, facing backwards with all the ports showing, working hard but not as cherished as it should have been.

So let’s do something about that now.

Back in 1992 I bought an external floppy drive for my Amiga A500 Plus.

This completely transformed the way I used the machine and was such an improvement right up until I bought a GVP Impact HD8+ hard drive – a SCSI Quantum LPS52 drive which gave a mind blowing 52 Megabytes of storage.

I’m slowly working through my collection of Amiga stuff and getting things tested and working. One of the godsends has been a Gotek floppy disk emulator. It allows you to download .adf disk images onto a USB drive and emulates a floppy drive. It is great for getting things set up and installing hardware drivers etc.

So, I thought I would convert the slightly unreliable 30 year old floppy into an external Gotek drive.

Opening the Cumana CAX354 shows a citizen floppy mechanism and a small board to allow pass through and disable switch.