The Purple OLED Project

If you’ve been following my journey, you might recall a video I did a while back where I converted an old Amiga external floppy drive into something cool and retro-inspired. If you missed that one, no worries—I’ve linked it below. We’re taking things a step further. I’m about to transform this incredibly grubby, stained Cumana drive into something truly special, and I’m super excited to share the process with you.

Retro GOTEK

The Vision: A Purple OLED Dream

Ever since I started this project, I’ve had one thing in mind: creating a purple OLED screen. I know it sounds a bit ambitious, but that’s exactly what I’m aiming for. Imagine pairing that vibrant purple screen with the Charity Amiga’s purple case—how cool would that be? Today, we’re going to see if we can bring that vision to life.

Before we dive in, though, I have to issue a little disclaimer: please remember that I’m not exactly a professional. In fact, I’m just an enthusiast with a lot of curiosity and a willingness to experiment (sometimes wildly). So, if you decide to follow along, do so at your own risk!

The Not-So-Exciting Prep Work

Like with any good project, I had to start by cleaning everything. And I mean everything. The drive, the cables—nothing escaped my cleaning spree. I won’t bore you with the details of rubbing down cables, but trust me, it was necessary.

The Transformation Begins

Now, let’s talk about the case. It started off in a horrible state—stained, yellowed, and just plain ugly. But with a little bit of elbow grease and a lot of black paint, it’s undergone a serious transformation. It’s now a sleek, glittery black, which I think gives it a much more retro and sophisticated look.

You might remember from the previous video (linked bove) that I built a black Gotek drive with a blue OLED display. It looked pretty cool, but I had my heart set on purple this time around. Finding a purple OLED display, however, turned out to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. After scouring the internet, I came up empty-handed—purple just isn’t a color that’s readily available in OLED displays. I found plenty of blue, orange, green, and white options, but purple? Not a chance.

The Lighting Hack: Creating a Purple OLED

But I wasn’t about to give up. Drawing on my days in theater and lighting design, I decided to try a little hack: using a color filter. By cutting some purple lighting gel to size and securing it with double-sided sticky tape, I managed to give the white OLED display a purple hue.

And guess what? It worked better than I expected! The purple actually looks really good. One trick I used to enhance the effect was turning the OLED contrast up to its maximum setting. You can adjust the contrast in the FF.CFG file, which you load onto a USB drive—just like any other configuration for FlashFloppy. If you’re interested in trying this yourself, I’ll link the GitHub page for FlashFloppy along with the specific configuration details you need.

Flash Floppy Config Wiki : https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy/…

oled-contrast=255

Final Touches and Thoughts

To add a little extra flair, I decided to make the inside of the drive pink, giving it a neon accent that ties in nicely with the purple Amiga aesthetic. I’m really pleased with how it turned out—I think the combination of colors gives it a unique, retro-futuristic vibe that’s hard to resist.

I hope you’ll agree with me that the final result looks pretty amazing. This project was a lot of fun, and it’s always satisfying to see a rough, grimy piece of tech turned into something stylish and functional. And if you liked this project, why not give it a try yourself? Who knows, you might surprise yourself with what you can create!

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