- I decided to replace the HxC Floppy Emulator with a Gotek Floppy Emulator running FlashFloppy! The primary reason was that I needed the HxC's more advanced jumper settings in another project. After the swap was done, I realized the Gotek was a great replacement and actually suited me and the EII better. More on that later.
- Use emulator UFA1M44-100, plug usb flash drive on it, connect to computer, read and write data under WINDOWS XP/2000/7. Jumper setting (SFR1M44 -TU100 K SFR1M44 -U100K -R) J5 -JA set to generete READY signal on 34pin of floppy driver interface JC -JB -S0 Driver select 0 S1 Driver select 1 MO Motor Jumper setting (SFR1M44 -U100K) J5.
- Also, the Gotek drive MUST BE the SFRM72-FU-DL because is the only one which works at DD (720ks) and has READY signal (with a jumper setting) The DSKIMA (Alpha version, is a quick and dirty program) is the soft I used to convert DSKs to IMG and do first testings with USB floppy drives. I use the Gotek original firmware.
(this is a guest post from Tenox) Draftsight 2018 free download for mac.
This is a continuation of my another post where I do a high level overview of different Floppy Disk Emulators. Gotek is one of them but from various research I have done before buying it I antcipated it will be the worst. Unfortunately the claims turned to be true.
Gotek USB floppy emulator. This is a great solution for replacing a old floppy drive. It works like this. Some computers require different jumper settings on the. Assuming you have an IBM-style floppy cable, with wires 10-16 twisted, you will want to set both drives to S1. You will also need to configure the Olivetti's BIOS to expect two 720k floppy drives connected. The MO jumper is likely controlling how the Gotek responds to the Motor Enable signal.
The emulator arrived by FedEx earlier on today. It only took two days since the order, which is excellent, but unfortunately this was the only good thing about Gotek.
The FedEx bag looked like it has been used by at least 5 previous shipments and has already circled the globe few times. The inner package was even worse, a bit of old bubble wrap taped together with the unit and unpacked cdrom. Disgusting!
(this is a guest post from Tenox) Draftsight 2018 free download for mac.
This is a continuation of my another post where I do a high level overview of different Floppy Disk Emulators. Gotek is one of them but from various research I have done before buying it I antcipated it will be the worst. Unfortunately the claims turned to be true.
Gotek USB floppy emulator. This is a great solution for replacing a old floppy drive. It works like this. Some computers require different jumper settings on the. Assuming you have an IBM-style floppy cable, with wires 10-16 twisted, you will want to set both drives to S1. You will also need to configure the Olivetti's BIOS to expect two 720k floppy drives connected. The MO jumper is likely controlling how the Gotek responds to the Motor Enable signal.
The emulator arrived by FedEx earlier on today. It only took two days since the order, which is excellent, but unfortunately this was the only good thing about Gotek.
The FedEx bag looked like it has been used by at least 5 previous shipments and has already circled the globe few times. The inner package was even worse, a bit of old bubble wrap taped together with the unit and unpacked cdrom. Disgusting!
The unit itself looks rather good, they have made a better looking self adhesive front panel label.
I went to replace my original 1.44MB floppy drive with Gotek. First roadblock that I encountered was the fact that the emulator is about an inch shorter and the original floppy cable did not reach so I had to improvise. The unit powered on so I went on to the documentation and software.
Gotek Floppy Emulator Jumper Settings Windows 10
Documentation is absolutely horrible. Written in Engrish is rather hard to understand, however invaluable because without it you will not be able to figure out how to use the software. Looks like they are aware of the software limitations because the documentation is full of workarounds and troubleshooting.
The software is even worse. It only works on Windows XP / 2000, so I had to run it inside VMware Workstation with USB pass-through It actually did work but usability is similar to RiscOS or Plan 9. Here is a photo from one of the manual pages that illustrates both the documentation and the application itself.
So how does it actually work? Here is a small excerpt from the user manual: 'We will divide a pen drive into 100 partitions of 1.44 mb capacity each.' – err what? That's right, this is what they are doing. Dividing a pen drive to small partitions and multiplexing them so that you see one at a time. You select the partition using the buttons on the front panel or from the software. When you switch the floppy drive will be mapped to another partition. On the host computer you can see it as a removable drive in Windows Explorer.
Gotek has promised me that the Type-F will support non-FAT and bootable floppy disks. So I started testing with writing QNX2 aclock demo floppy disk using ntrawrite.
The system has completely freaked out and went to an error mode. Fortunately described in the troubleshooting guide, however requires full reformatting. Now imagine rewriting 100 floppy disks stored on the unit… I spent hours trying to figure what is going in. What I think is that the non-FAT bootable disk can only be used in 'singular mode' where you store just a single floppy disk image on the pen drive. What a waste, but it did work and in the end I did boot QNX2 on my 286 from a pen drive.
The next test was trying to boot Xenix from emulated 1.2MB 5.25″ drive. I have re formatted the singular drive to 1.2MB and switched it in the bios. However the system never actually loaded.
When it comes to FAT compatible operating systems like MS-DOS or OS/2, you can actually boot and use multiplexed floppies. You can install MS-DOS 6.22 by flipping the selector to change disks. Pretty cool. I was also able to run BIOS built in floppy disk diagnostics.
So the device sort of works. I was able to boot a non-DOS operating system and for DOS based floppies I was able to hold more than one disk per USB key. However the whole experience was rather horrible. The verdict:
- Packaging: garbage
- Usability: garbage
- Software: garbage
- User manual: garbage
- Compatibility: garbage
- Total: garbage
So in short do not waste your time with this. Do not buy Gotek unless you absolutely have to.
I'm still awaiting for arrival of HxC, however it appears to be stuck in Polish Post Office, probably due to the holiday season. Is wow for mac.
Update: EMUFDD has provided me with a link to their page that lists all Gotek-like cheap Chinese and Indian made devices – with a warning how bad they are. They are claiming that German Ipcas also sells Gotek like devices, so I will be updating my previous post.
This is a great solution for replacing a old floppy drive. It works like this:
The gotek has built in 999 locations where you can place a floppydisk image. This image contains the contents of one floppy disk. These pre made images are usually easy to find on the Internet, but you can easily make a image of a real floppy disk you own.
All you have to do to use the gotek, is to put the images on a USB pen drive, and assign each disk a number. The gotek has 2 buttons in the front, where you can select the disks. One for up and one for down. Lets say you want to boot from a game or program that you assigned to slot 5. All you have to do, is to press the buttons untill the display shows 005, and the disk will load. You can press the buttons back and forth to select images, and your computer will behave as if you inserted that floppy disk. Its a great way to get rid of those old worn out floppy disks, and great to save space.
Available upgrades:
-Speaker that emulates floppy loading sounds!
-OLED screen that replaces the original display, so that the name of the disk is shown in letters instead of numbers, meaning you dont have to keep track of where you assigned your images.
The drive itself: The drive comes new with a really bad firmware that hardly can be used to anything. So you need to circomvent the protection of the drive, and flash it with a new firmware. I use FlashFloppy. If I sell one of these, they are already flashed with FlashFloppy.
Once the protection has been broken, future updates is as easy as to put the updated firmware in the root of the USB stick, and power on the gotek with both buttons in the front pressed in at once. The drive will now update itself. Be careful not to disconnect the power during this process.
This drive can be connected to any computer that has the same Shugart 34-pin header, such as
Acorn Archimedes
Acorn BBC Micro
Akai Synthesizers
Amstrad CPC
Atari ST
Commodore Amiga
DEC
Dragon
E-mu ESI-32
Ensoniq
General Music (GEM) Synthesizers
IBM PC
Korg
Memotech
MSX
NEC PC-98
Roland
Sequential Circuits Prophet 3000
Spectrum
Tandy Color Computer
TI-99/4A
UKNC, DVK Paragon ntfs for mac wd download.
The FlashFloppy firmware ensures that they all work.
WARNING! If you connect the power cable in the back wrong, IT WILL KILL THE DRIVE.
Gotek Usb Floppy Emulator
Some computers require different jumper settings on the drive. Usually all you have to do, is to move jumper S1 to S0. If that dont work, try these options:
Jumper at S1 only
Jumpers at JC and S0
Jumpers at JC and S1
Gotek Floppy Emulator Jumper Settings
These files must reside in the root of the USB stick for it to work
Gotek Floppy Emulator Jumper Settings Chrome
This project with PCB and parts can be purchased on ebay: https://www.ebay.com/usr/kirsti_73
or from Sellmyretro.com
