Most support only 1.44MB disks, some only support 720KB disks and I believe one mode does only 1.2MB disks. As they come, these devices only support one kind of floppy disk format. Look here for a fairly priced and functional unit. However, as they come they are at best diamonds in the rough, so in this blog entry I will describe how to make these devices more useful for vintage IBM PCs and compatibles.Ī basic Gotek model can be had for less than $30. While originally intended to replace disk drives in industrial, sewing and musical equipment, they can be used with standard PC floppy controllers. There are many varieties of these devices and they usually come with a USB port on the front of the unit and a 34-pin header + 4-pin power header on the back. It is certainly doable, but the added effort and room for error might not be worth the cost of just buying a second emulator.The Gotek floppy drive emulator is a simple, cheap and little device that, as its name says, emulates a floppy drive. If you use an interface program like the disk emulator, you will have to jump through the hoops of using that to manually load the files through their interface. That way you can use the selector on the front to pick what disk you want to be using and treat it like a physical disk (drag/drop files, etc). Put one in the machine and one in your computer. You could spend a while trying various bits of software to make it work, but given your comment about not being a computer person, I think you would be better off buying a pair of new ones. The manual for CNC Floppy Emulation Manager Tool that th90 mentioned says that it requires 7mb per disk and is compatible with floppy disk images. The one I linked above uses slightly more memory than the size of the disk itself because it is just writing to memory locations and ignoring all the metadata. The windows gui will only let you pick the file formats it thinks are your best options.ĭoing some more research on a variety of these emulators, there appear to be several methods in use to encode the different disks. Rufus ( Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way) is a good program for testing out various formatting options on a drive. Worth a try, although it may not apply to your situation.ĬhipThe FAT16 vs FAT32 is something that is likely to trip you up as well. It will only accept smaller drives (I think 2 gig or less) and must be formatted as FAT (16, though not labeled as such) rather than FAT-32 or NTFS. I have an industrial-type single-board computer running a DOS variant that does USB drives.
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