Gotek on newer PCs

[Eudimorphodon]

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.

The thing that gnaws on me slightly about the idea of hooking up a USB floppy controller to the back of a Gotek is I wonder if when you change floppy images on the the Gotek (I'm assuming you're using one hacked with FlashFloppy or whatever) if it will reliably and completely emulate the activity of the READY/DISK CHANGED lines, and *if* doing that might be a prerequisite to informing Windows that you changed out the filesystem underneath it. It's been a long time since I messed with real floppy disks under Windows and I'm not up to date about whether just yanking a disk out without an Eject action is a safe thing to do.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

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'm fine with that. The fact that I cannot locate the devices I saw now makes the point somewhat moot. If it can't be bought its not helpful to OP.

 

[Hak Foo]

I'm sort of surprised that nobody's created some sort of loadable module that talks ti a GreaseWeazle, but appears to the OS as a removable drive. I'd imagine you could cobble together something with a "mount" command that imaged the disc and mounted the image as a loopback filesystem, then monitored for changes to it and wrote them back to the physical disc.

For my "physical floppy" fix, I use a LS-120 on a PATA-SATA converter. It would be interesting to experiment with the much rarer SCSI floppies out there, either with a modern PCI-E SCSI card or a USB-SCSI adapter.

 

[Unknown_K]

There are PCIE to Parallel port cards and there are Parallel port floppy drives correct?

 

[Eudimorphodon]

There are PCIE to Parallel port cards and there are Parallel port floppy drives correct?

PCIe parallel ports don’t work with DOS based OSes, and parallel port floppy drives were obsolete the day USB came out, so that’s an interesting driver problem you’re setting up there…

 

[Zare]

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.

There should be no distinction, the USB adapter presents the Gotek to the same operating system interface as the latter combo.
If Gotek is able to do something that FileDisk isn't, it can't do it unless Windows has specific driver support for it.

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.

NT based Windows do not work with direct hardware I/O from application level, you are always running through an abstraction.

For connecting old devices this is a showstopper because it's not only the electronic signalling bridge that's important, software won't work. A parallel port DOS/win32 software expects to make a read/write on hardware port using real mode. This thing does not exist for PCI, PCI-X, USB transports and such a parallel port is implemented through an abstracted driver which communicates within the bus interface part of kernel on one side, exposing functionality API on the other. That API does not necessarily support low level parallel digital I/O, it might expose higher level printing standards instead.

No, there is no better option than software imaging on such a motherboard. Images+writing software+USB floppy that can handle all the disk formats you have images for, is an optimum.

 

[h2ospa]

I'm sort of surprised that nobody's created some sort of loadable module that talks ti a GreaseWeazle, but appears to the OS as a removable drive. I'd imagine you could cobble together something with a "mount" command that imaged the disc and mounted the image as a loopback filesystem, then monitored for changes to it and wrote them back to the physical disc.

Same for gotek. Would be nice if there is a usb version of gotek -- replace the 34-pin connector with a usb type b or type c port, and make OS recognize it as a usb removable storage device.

Even if such device exist, it will always be an emulator.
But using a gotek + a usb-floppy adapter would be a double emulation that is even more prone to issues.

 

[h2ospa]

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.

How about: with a gotek you can switch between floppy without doing "unmount", "mount" thru the OS interactions?
Besides, if there is a gotek-like device that can act as a usb floppy, potentially it can be used at boot time, if the BIOS has an option of booting from usb floppy.

Essentially, yes, both are emulating a floppy drive (and disks). It is all about user experience.

 

[Plasma]

How about: with a gotek you can switch between floppy without doing "unmount", "mount" thru the OS interactions?

Essentially, yes, both are emulating a floppy drive (and disks). It is all about user experience.

But you are just moving the interaction from Windows to the Gotek. I understand why people use Goteks, but to me it's still not a floppy disk "user experience."

I would argue that the Gotek is actually less convenient in this scenario, because to add/remove floppy images you need to swap the USB stick between the Gotek and the PC.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

But you are just moving the interaction from Windows to the Gotek. I understand why people use Goteks, but to me it's still not a floppy disk "user experience."

If you bought a ton of cheap small USB drives and manually switched them out it would *sorta* be like the floppy experience, but I don't think that's what the OP was going for. And I'm really not sure what you'd want to use that for on modern windows.


That said, I am totally planning to buy a mess of 128mb sticks to do this for myself on my DOS machine. I just like physical media.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

He what about a Zulu SCSI for the OP? PCIe SCSI cards definitely exist and can talk to modern windows, and Zulu can emulate a floppy drive.

 

[thisisamigaspeaking]

He what about a Zulu SCSI for the OP? PCIe SCSI cards definitely exist and can talk to modern windows, and Zulu can emulate a floppy drive.

Sounds expensive and convoluted, and still no different from just mounting an image with Windows software.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

This is starting to sound like a contest to dream up the most convoluted possible way of solving a very trivial problem. Which, I guess to be totally clear, I'm totally up for, but...

But you are just moving the interaction from Windows to the Gotek. I understand why people use Goteks, but to me it's still not a floppy disk "user experience."

I would argue that the Gotek is actually less convenient in this scenario, because to add/remove floppy images you need to swap the USB stick between the Gotek and the PC.

Yeah, I guess I'm just not grasping the real point of this. Assuming this is a modified Gotek with the little OLED display on it the process of changing a disk image involves slightly awkwardly navigating a menu with buttons (and/or a rotary encoder, if you've added one of those) to pick out a disk image and mount it. I'll confess I haven't used WinImage/FileDisk (I tend to use UNIX-y tools for messing with disk images and/or MacOS, which has disk image mounting built in) but it looks like it has both a shell interface and a little dingus that can sit in your system tray, is that actually more work than the Gotek display?

Huh. Interestingly enough there seems to be a "Mount-DiskImage" command documented for Microsoft's Powershell CLI. I wonder if it works with raw floppy images...

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Sounds expensive and convoluted, and still no different from just mounting an image with Windows software.

No more convoluted than using a Gotek, except that adding SCSI capability to a modern PC is easier than adding a floppy controller.

This is starting to sound like a contest to dream up the most convoluted possible way of solving a very trivial problem. Which, I guess to be totally clear, I'm totally up for, but...

Mhmmm, don't tempt me. I have thoughts.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

No more convoluted than using a Gotek, except that adding SCSI capability to a modern PC is easier than adding a floppy controller.

… no? Sure, PCIe scsi cards exist, but they’re rare, expensive, and the cabling is super awkward. ZuluSCSI isn’t exactly cheap either, and also, where is the “user friendly” interface for swapping between disk images? Maybe I’m missing something, but *is* there a model of ZuluSCSI that has a display and selection buttons like a hacked Gotek?

A USB floppy controller dingus plus a Gotek is kinda dumb, but assuming it works it’ll cost a third or less the SCSI solution.

 

[Agent Orange]

Works with W7 & W11 - cheap at about $17.

 

[thisisamigaspeaking]

Same for gotek. Would be nice if there is a usb version of gotek -- replace the 34-pin connector with a usb type b or type c port, and make OS recognize it as a usb removable storage device.

Yeah, not seeing this at all. What does a USB Gotek achieve that putting the same flash drive with disk images in a USB port would not? If you are using some kind of DOS emulator you will be working with images to begin with. What other software are you thinking would use a floppy as a floppy?

The whole point of a Gotek is to offer the electrical floppy connections for devices which have 34-pin floppy drive connections. That's the entire point. If you just want to mount floppy disk images off a USB drive you don't need anything other than a USB port.

 

[h2ospa]

Yeah, not seeing this at all. What does a USB Gotek achieve that putting the same flash drive with disk images in a USB port would not? If you are using some kind of DOS emulator you will be working with images to begin with. What other software are you thinking would use a floppy as a floppy?

The whole point of a Gotek is to offer the electrical floppy connections for devices which have 34-pin floppy drive connections. That's the entire point. If you just want to mount floppy disk images off a USB drive you don't need anything other than a USB port.

I know I know. It sounds stupid indeed.

What I am trying to find is a mixture of "(a usb floppy drive - the actual drive) + (a gotek-kind of thing to process floppy images - the 34-pin connection)" (read the + and - signs as you are doing math), without using a software solution. Most OSs and/or BIOS support a usb floppy drive (the "USB Mass Storage Class, UFI device, Floppy Device Unit" specs https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usbmass-ufi10.pdf).

To answer your question "What does a USB Gotek achieve that putting the same flash drive with disk images in a USB port would not?" I would say "none", if you do use a software to mount the floppy image. But that's what i am trying to avoid.
Again it sounds stupid. Some people don't mind running a floppy image mounting software, I personally do not like that.

 

[thisisamigaspeaking]

To answer your question "What does a USB Gotek achieve that putting the same flash drive with disk images in a USB port would not?" I would say "none", if you do use a software to mount the floppy image. But that's what i am trying to avoid.
Again it sounds stupid. Some people don't mind running a floppy image mounting software, I personally do not like that.

What modern software uses a floppy drive as a floppy drive? I don't think any software since the early 90s, or 80s in the case of PC compatibles, has cared that what it is loading actually be on a floppy rather than on some other storage device. Can you explain your use case and what specifically you are trying to achieve? A floppy to Windows NT is just a very small storage device. What is it you need chunks of 1.44MB storage for under any OS that would even recognize a USB floppy drive?

USB floppy drives, like Goteks, are for addressing an issue with physical connections or media. A USB floppy drive is not really intended as a storage device, it is merely to be able to access floppy disks to interact in either direction with systems that do not have USB. A Gotek is not intended as a USB storage device for a modern computer, it is intended as a way to make USB storage work on old systems that only have a floppy controller and whose software and OS expect floppy disks. Eliminating the physical part of the equation eliminates the need for such a device. Having USB eliminates the need for things to adapt USB to floppy formats. These type of devices would not exist without the need to bridge the physical gap.

Nobody is going to make that USB-device-to-swap-floppy-images-with-a-button for you if you can't or won't make it for yourself because as far as I can tell it serves no purpose. If you just want to be able to access floppy images to pull the files off of them, I don't think anyone else in the world is going to agree that is better served by a custom device for $30 or whatever than a piece of free software. Maybe you could rig something up to work off a keypad or Elgato Stream Deck or whatever if the button is the key feature for you.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Another warning I'm going to chuck out there about this idea of using a USB to floppy drive dingus attached to a Gotek; I think it's very likely that it'll only work with 1.44MB images. I haven't found an actual *manual* for these things, but reading the "sorta detailed" description of one on eBay it's pretty explicit about it only working with "ordinary" 1.44MB floppy drives, it specifically says:

"Not for jumper floppy drive, 720KB floppy drive, 1.2MB floppy drive"

There are some YouTube videos of people messing with the USB->floppy controllers from older USB floppy drives where the unit was a separate board like this (it's built into a single PCB on very late thinline USB floppy drives), and the results with trying to make them work with anything *but* a 1.44MB floppy drive are *extremely* hit and miss. (There's been some luck in convincing them to read 1.2MB floppies, but that's dependent on a mix of the driver used and whether the control board supported an oddball 1.2MB 360RPM 3.5" disk format almost exclusively used in Japan.) I would probably wager a shiny new nickel that these problems are going to apply to a Gotek as well, and therefore your chances of success are going to spiral sharply downward for anything other than "native sized" images. (I'm torn about whether you're going to have a chance with *either* 720k or 360k images, or if 360K will work if 720k does, but... it must be said that a lot of modern physical USB floppy drives don't support 720K anymore, which to my mind negatively impacts the odds.)