I was just thinking the other day, I'd not actually posted a pic of it back together..... so here it is.
It now contains 0 mice!
Regarding the gotek:
I think there's three main models of the gotek drives, the older ones had a STM32F105 controller and the newer ones have either an Artery AT32F415 or AT32F435.
Most sellers don't specify which one you get and the last couple of cheap ones I've bought had the AT32F415 which is the worst one as it's got almost no RAM. However for anything basic and old I've not had an issue with this.
So you can probably just get the cheapest one on Aliexpress and it'll be fine, if you can get a AT32F435 model then that's ideal.
I was trying to get the flashfloppy firmware running as it's probably the best and most supported. I wouldn't bother paying the sky high prices for a gotek pre installed with flashfloppy as it's a 10 minute job, you just might need to make a double ended A to A USB lead if you don't have one.
Now I didn't actually get too far with my implementation as, at that point, I had no idea if the Cortex, floppy drives or Gotec were the issue, and when I managed to get a BBC micro floppy drive booting, I then moved over to that for the last bits of testing.
There's a huge load of config options for the flashfloppy firmware and my success was just booting a raw image of a 40 track boot disk I'd made with a greaseweazle (the hfe zip file attached to one of these posts), so most config options are not relevant.
I must confess that despite the final reassembly being the perfect time to start working on getting a config going and making some disk images ... it went on the shelf
I had a couple of issues formatting disks on my 80 track BBC micro drive as it would fail right at the end, which was the first step into me getting some disk images to start testing on as the 40 track drives that my cortex has can't exactly hold much.
I would like to pick this back up, I've got a bit of a backlog of machines I'm working on but maybe I could clear a corner out and get the cortex setup again to pootle about on.
My next steps were to get a known-good 80 track floppy written by the cortex and then image it via the greaseweazle and post it up on the flashfloppy forum to ask for help developing a config, as the dev seems quite helpful and involved.
Regarding read write speeds, I don't remember it being slow.... especially with a 40 track drive it's only actually got 40 steps before the end of the disk..... but happy to do some testing when it's back on the bench.
... so here it is.
I do want to upgrade the 9929 with something that can do RGB or VGA like that RP2040 project as the PAL output is terrible even with the video "fixes" applied.