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Gotek on newer PCs

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h2ospa

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Some newer motherboards don't even have a 34-pin floppy connection to support a floppy drive or a Gotek. Is there a way to connect a Gotek to those motherboards?

I don't necessary need to use a Gotek, but I would like to be able to mount floppy images and read/write them just like having a real floppy drive and disks.

If Gotek is not an option, is there a better option other than WinImage? I prefer not to use a "software" method.
 
Looking on Amazon you can buy a USB floppy controller on a PCB with a 34-pin socket, so you can (hopefully) use a Gotek like you can one of those el cheapo USB floppy drives. YMMV, as with all the weird nu-retro stuff that gets turned out from China. Unfortunately I've never heard of a "real" FDC chip getting put on a PCI card that you could use with a newer PC.
 
You can also buy PCIe floppy controllers that would let you use the gotek on a fully modern PC.
 
Well I've seen such things in the past, but today I cannot seem to find one. Just an endless supply of PCIe IDE and firewire controllers. Weird.



You could use a USB floppy controller to a gotech and still have it mounted internally like this:


Just run the cable out the back if you haven't got an internal USB port.


I don't know how you'd manage drivers; but if you have a PCI floppy controller available, you could use a PCIe to PCI bridge to install it. These things are hella-fiddly to mount but its an option.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
You can also buy PCIe floppy controllers that would let you use the gotek on a fully modern PC.
Click to expand...

No such thing exists, and will never exist.

The floppy controller is intrinsically tied to the ISA bus due to needing IRQ6 and DMA channel 2. Modern buses don't provide access to that, so unless you have a motherboard with a floppy controller or available ISA slot, you have no real floppy controller.

You can use software to control the floppy drive, but it will never work or behave like a real floppy drive, and most certainly won't work with a Gotek. There are projects like greaseweazle, but that is for dumping the raw data of a floppy, not controlling a gotek.
 
h2ospa said:
If Gotek is not an option, is there a better option other than WinImage? I prefer not to use a "software" method.
Click to expand...

… are you trying to do this under bare metal DOS or something else that makes a software wedge not work? Because if you’re just running Windows I don’t think there are many cases where a program would be able to tell the difference between a filesystem mounted through a driver like FileDisk and the same filesystem residing on a physical floppy drive/emulator.

GiGaBiTe said:
The floppy controller is intrinsically tied to the ISA bus due to needing IRQ6 and DMA channel 2. Modern buses don't provide access to that, so unless you have a motherboard with a floppy controller or available ISA slot, you have no real floppy controller.
Click to expand...

I guess this technically depends on how you define “real” floppy controller. If someone really, really wanted a 34 pin floppy pinout on a PCIe card that had *bios* support for emulating a floppy drive they could slap a PCIe-USB bridge + a USB floppy controller onto a card and cobble together a legacy BIOS extension that would let it work as well as USB floppy drives work under DOS as well as they do when plugged into “legacy-free” PCs… but yes, this would be a silly and pointless thing to do.

FWIW, very few DOS programs care about the floppy drive interface at this level, so unless you’re trying to specify run something like a DOS disk imaging program, some ancient copy-protected disks, or an ancient alternate OS on a modern PC trying to duplicate a “real” floppy controller is pointless in its entirety. (It’s not like programs in these categories are likely to run on a modern PC for any number of other reasons even if you could magically gift it with a completely authentic ISA floppy controller… but nothing else.)
 
Eudimorphodon said:
I guess this technically depends on how you define “real” floppy controller.
Click to expand...
All I know is I have previously seen devices that plug into a PCIe slot and have a 34 pin floppy header. The ad prominently labeled it as a floppy controller. Exactly how it worked, I cannot say; but I don't assume modern BIOSs and boot to floppy.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
… are you trying to do this under bare metal DOS or something else that makes a software wedge not work? Because if you’re just running Windows I don’t think there are many cases where a program would be able to tell the difference between a filesystem mounted through a driver like FileDisk and the same filesystem residing on a physical floppy drive/emulator.
Click to expand...
For this project, I am not interested in low-level floppy operations. But, I would like to have a non-software-based solution that, just like using a gotek, I can switch a "disk" on the fly, without manually unmounting and mounting a disk image in the OS.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
If someone really, really wanted a 34 pin floppy pinout on a PCIe card that had *bios* support for emulating a floppy drive they could slap a PCIe-USB bridge + a USB floppy controller onto a card and cobble together a legacy BIOS extension that would let it work as well as USB floppy drives work under DOS as well as they do when plugged into “legacy-free” PCs
Click to expand...
Yes it would be totally silly. I am totally not going to do that. :biggrin::biggrin: But if there is a "usb floppy drive" counterpart that does a similar thing, but in a gotek-kind of interface (an usb port, some switches to switch disk images, but communicate with the pc via usb), that would be perfect.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
All I know is I have previously seen devices that plug into a PCIe slot and have a 34 pin floppy header. The ad prominently labeled it as a floppy controller. Exactly how it worked, I cannot say; but I don't assume modern BIOSs and boot to floppy.
Click to expand...

Are you sure it wasn't actually a 40 pin IDE header and the description wasn't just badly machine-translated junk? Because (as odd as it may be) PCIe PATA controller boards do definitely exist:
Screenshot 2024-08-26 at 3.16.42 PM.png

And thanks to search engine positioning magic it's very possible some particularly stupid e-commerce website might have included a card like that in a search for "PCIe floppy controller card". Like, say, Amazon, which has that very same EIDE card number 5 in the search results for that phrase, and also has these items as the top two hits:

Screenshot 2024-08-26 at 3.23.02 PM.png

I'm sure it won't surprise you to know that, no, these don't actually have floppy controllers on them, they're just serial port cards.
 
 
h2ospa said:
Yes it would be totally silly. I am totally not going to do that. :biggrin::biggrin:
Click to expand...

Here's the really great part: the way I described that theoretical PCIe floppy controller was intentionally meant to sound absurd, but there are actual PCIe cards built to supply legacy ports that work exactly like that. For instance, there PCIe cards to allow you to use a PS/2 keyboard and mouse on your modern computer that are just a cheap USB host chip soldered onto the same PCB as a USB PS/2 keyboard/mouse adapter.

To your computer your keyboard and mouse will look *exactly* like they would if they were plugged into a USB PS/2 keyboard/mouse adapter... except it costs four times as much, wastes a PCIe slot, and if your BIOS has any legacy-free keyboard support it probably doesn't work with it. So, you know, it's actually worse.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
For instance, there PCIe cards to allow you to use a PS/2 keyboard and mouse on your modern computer that are just a cheap USB hub chip soldered onto the same PCB as a USB PS/2 keyboard/mouse adapter.
Click to expand...
I wonder why would people even build this (and try to sell it :biggrin: ). An usb/ps2 adapter can plug directly to an usb port.
 
h2ospa said:
I wonder why would people even build this (and try to sell it :biggrin: ). An usb/ps2 adapter can plug directly to an usb port.
Click to expand...

The most charitable explanation I can think of is maybe someone might legitimately think that having the ports built in is better from a "less mess/less to lose" standpoint. My jaded explanation is that this dingus is meant to prey on a certain subset of gamers who've bought into theories about PS/2 ports having "less latency" or other advantages over USB(*) and think that by getting this PCIe card they're gaining some magical advantage in Fortnite or whatever. Which, obviously, they're not, but as long as you don't explain it to them maybe the placebo effect will be enough to let them think they got their money's worth.

(* As to these theories... yes, PS/2 has a few theoretical efficiency and latency advantages *depending on how you're using the hardware*, but in the real world, with a CPU that wasn't included as a free prize in a box of cereal in 1998, nobody needs to care. But tell that to a true believer.)
 
h2ospa said:
that would be the "silly" solution Eudimorphodon suggested, which i would totally avoid if possible.
Click to expand...

That is not the "silly" solution. The device I linked to is just the guts from an external USB floppy drive with a header attached for you to provide your own floppy drive. Its exactly as "absurd" as just using a USB floppy drive. Something I'm pretty sure most of us own.

But it will(should) work with a Gotek and provide exactly what you asked for: a gotek you can access while in windows on a modern computer.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Positive.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately unless you can find a screenshot or spec sheet for this product this seems like something that has to be filed under "pics or it didn't happen".

I mean, PCIe came out in 2003, you can't quite say floppy drives were *completely* dead at that point, but... they were pining for the fjords rather intensely. I can't find any solid evidence that even PCI(no-e) floppy controllers were ever really a thing outside oddballs like the Catweasel, and that's pushing the threshold back another whole decade.
 
h2ospa said:
Some newer motherboards don't even have a 34-pin floppy connection to support a floppy drive or a Gotek. Is there a way to connect a Gotek to those motherboards?

I don't necessary need to use a Gotek, but I would like to be able to mount floppy images and read/write them just like having a real floppy drive and disks.

If Gotek is not an option, is there a better option other than WinImage? I prefer not to use a "software" method.
Click to expand...
If you are using "modern" Windows, I don't see a meaningful distinction between Gotek + USB adapter vs WinImage + FileDisk. They are both emulating a floppy drive.
 
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