- Gotek usb floppy emulator software how to#
- Gotek usb floppy emulator software install#
- Gotek usb floppy emulator software serial#
Gotek usb floppy emulator software serial#
Now to re-flash the firmware using a 3.3V USB to serial adapter:
Gotek usb floppy emulator software install#
To install the FlashFloppy firmware you need programming headers on the circuit board (which aren’t installed by default). Perhaps it was worth getting the second drive working with FlashFloppy and trying that to see if it worked any better?įirst off, let’s open up the new Gotek drive: Here I had another Gotek to compare it to. I was in the middle of the Osborne restoration, so I put it to one side.īut since my original Gotek wasn’t fully working with the Osborne, it got me thinking.
So I ordered another Gotek drive from China. I thought I’d like to give it a try, but didn’t want to re-flash my Gotek hardware in case it broke something. I found out about FlashFloppy a few months ago. It seems having a competitor is good for the ecosystem :-) It’s interesting that this seems to have spurred on development of HxC too, as the missing features added to FlashFloppy (sound and rotary encoder support) have now also been added to HxC. This is now almost as mature as the HxC firmware, and is free and open-source. It seems others were also frustrated at the lack of progress from a closed-source product, and a rival firmware came on the scene: FlashFloppy. (The source for these mods is available here.)įast forward a year. If it had been open-source I would have added those features myself, and fed the changes back.īut because it was closed, I had to add an Arduino alongside the Gotek hardware to fill in the missing bits.
sound emulation, rotary encoder support). There were features lacking in the HxC firmware (e.g. But it was a shame that the HxC firmware wasn’t open-source. I don’t begrudge the licence payment, as I’m very happy for people to be remunerated for their work. You needed to licence the firmware from him, but even with that cost, it was significantly cheaper than the dedicated HxC hardware. Then the author of the HxC system also ported his firmware to the Gotek hardware.
Gotek usb floppy emulator software how to#
Some Amiga users worked out how to flash the firmware to expand it to work with the Commodore Amiga computer (and named the revised firmware Cortex). This originally emulated just PC-style floppies. That was originally on dedicated hardware.īut then the Gotek floppy emulator came on the market, a cheap and cheerful piece of hardware from the Far East. At the time, the emulator that was compatible with the most different retro disk formats was the HxC. I constructed my USB floppy emulator last year as part of the Retro Challenge. Today it was time for a different approach. This meant I couldn’t use a physical drive at the same time as the emulator (for example to copy files between real and virtual disks) as the computer couldn’t select between the drives. In my last post, I had tried to get my Gotek/HxC USB floppy emulator working reliably with my Osborne computer.įor some reason the drive select signals from the Osborne weren’t getting through correctly to the Gotek/HxC. This is part of a series of posts for the Retro Challenge 2018/04.