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
The FlashFloppy firmware ensures that they all work.
WARNING! If you connect the power cable in the back wrong, IT WILL KILL THE DRIVE.
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
This flashed drive can be purchased on ebay: https://www.ebay.com/usr/kirsti_73
Leave a Reply