#USB FLOPPY EMULATOR PROGRAM HOW TO#
#USB FLOPPY EMULATOR PROGRAM INSTALL#
#USB FLOPPY EMULATOR PROGRAM SERIAL#
#USB FLOPPY EMULATOR PROGRAM MODS#
#USB FLOPPY EMULATOR PROGRAM SERIES#

a fault or damage with the Gotek hardware.

different revisions of the Gotek hardware.

So IвЂ™m still not sure why the other USB drive didnвЂ™t work. (As an aside, this вЂњcalenderвЂќ (sic) program on my Osborne disk image seems fully Y2K compliant!) Plugging in my trusty hacked extension cable:ДЄnd it works! And can select between a physical and a virtual drive :-) So IвЂ™ve now got a working Gotek/FlashFloppy drive. But theyвЂ™re still on a slow boat from China :-) The firmware can also use a high resolution OLED вЂ“ and I ordered a couple of those at the same time as the Gotek drive. One more tick for the open-source solution!Д¬urrently this Gotek has the built-in 3 character LED display.

#USB FLOPPY EMULATOR PROGRAM SERIAL#

ThatвЂ™s because it insisted on some stupid software that downloaded the firmware from the internet while it flashed it (apparently for copy-protection reasons) and it really didnвЂ™t get on with my cheap USB serial board. When I flashed the HxC firmware last year, it took me all afternoon. Wait вЂ“ that was it? It took about 30 seconds from start to finish! I was amazed that downloading it and typing вЂmakeвЂ™ built everything correctly with no errors and no missing dependencies! IвЂ™m so used to having to fix problems with UNIX/Linux programs ported to Mac OS, so that was such a refreshing change :-) I was using a Mac, so used the stm32flash program designed for Linux. My USB serial board has an extra wire soldered on for the 5V power supply from the USB, so I was able to power the Gotek from that during the flash process: Now to re-flash the firmware using a 3.3V USB to serial adapter:

#USB FLOPPY EMULATOR PROGRAM INSTALL#

To install the FlashFloppy firmware you need programming headers on the circuit board (which arenвЂ™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?ДЇirst off, letвЂ™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.Д«ut since my original Gotek wasnвЂ™t fully working with the Osborne, it got me thinking. So I ordered another Gotek drive from China. I thought IвЂ™d like to give it a try, but didnвЂ™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 :-) ItвЂ™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.

#USB FLOPPY EMULATOR PROGRAM MODS#

(The source for these mods is available here.)ДЇast forward a year. If it had been open-source I would have added those features myself, and fed the changes back.Д«ut 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 wasnвЂ™t open-source. I donвЂ™t begrudge the licence payment, as IвЂ™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.

#USB FLOPPY EMULATOR PROGRAM 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.Д«ut 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 couldnвЂ™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 couldnвЂ™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.ДЇor some reason the drive select signals from the Osborne werenвЂ™t getting through correctly to the Gotek/HxC.

#USB FLOPPY EMULATOR PROGRAM SERIES#

This is part of a series of posts for the Retro Challenge 2018/04.

Usb floppy emulator program