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Transform the Gotek Floppy Emulator into an Amiga Floppy emulator

DISCLAIMER :
No software from Gotek System was used or reversed to make this new firmware. Informations and softwares on this page are provided in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. The author will not be held liable for any loss, damage or failure or any incident related to the use of this software and informations. It’s not a commercial work and had been done at my free time so don’t expect instant support or warranty. The informations and softwares provided on this page can’t be sold directly or indirectly into a preflashed device.

Some time ago i bought one of these very low cost USB floppy emulator from ebay to play some ADF files on my Amiga. Unfortunately these drives was unable to support/emulate the Amiga sectors encoding scheme and couldn’t work on Amiga computers… But now all of this is past…

After some hours of coding the the Gotek firmware can now be replaced by an Amiga compatible firmware. This firmware allows to load any ADF file present on the USB key and play it on the Amiga !

A special boot ADF file allows to select the game or demo to start.

The Gotek Floppy emulator working on an Amiga 600 running the State Of The Art Demo :

Actual main features of this firmware :

– Read & Write 880KB ADF Files.
– USB Key support.
– FAT12,FAT16 & FAT32 support, Subfolder support.
– Amiga software to select the ADF files on the USB key.
– Tested on A500 & A600. Should work on all Amiga.

HOW TO USE IT  ?

This is quite simple : You have just to copy all your favourite ADF files on the USB Key.

On the Amiga you can select the ADF files thanks to a special ADF file (SELECTOR.ADF). Once done the Amiga restart on the first image selected. In the actual version you can select up to 30 999 images (position 001 up to 030 999 on the 7-segments display). By this way multi-disks games can be played without problem.

The 7-segments display on the emulator shows the actual disk number selected. You can change the disk with the two buttons present on the front of the emulator.

To start again the special ADF you have just to select the position “000” and restart your Amiga. The menu appears in less than 10 seconds. In the software you can use the joystick or the arrows + enter at the keyboard to choose the images and save the selection.

WHERE TO GET THIS EMULATOR ?

The Gotek floppy emulators can be found everywhere.  Since all Gotek drives are based on the same hardware, any version should be compatible.
For reference i got the drive for 24.5Euros/33$ (Shipping included) on Ebay (Link to the Ebay page here)

I also bought a different model, without the 7- segments display & buttons from another place to check if there is some differences. There is no difference and the firmware is working on both models without any modification.

OK I HAVE THE EMULATOR, HOW TO « TRANSFORM » IT ?

To do this you need :

  • Any serial RS232<>3.3V TTL adapter or USB to serial cable. I used an FTDI TTL-232R-3V3, but anything providing a 3,3V signal level is ok. TX & RX support is enough to reflash the MCU (no hardware handshake needed) . ( Some places to get this kind of cable :  https://www.adafruit.com/products/954 ,  ebay 1 , ebay 2 )
    (EDIT : Since the STM32 serial port pins are 5V tolerant, a 5V version of the cable/adapter should be fine too.)

The progamming port can be found at the rear of the emulator. Most of time you don’t even need to open it 🙂 :

Here is the list of connections to do :
– Connect BOOT0 to 3.3V : This will put the device in programming mode at power up.
– Connect TX to the RX wire of the 3.3V serial cable.
– Connect RX to the TX wire of the 3.3V serial cable.
– Connect VSS to the ground wire of the serial cable.
– Connect the 5V to a 5V source. I just used the 5V coming from the FTDI cable.

Note: The above picture shows you the actual pinout of the programming port, not where to plug the wires: Don’t forget to cross connect the TX and RX lines between the adapter and the usb drive (adapter TX on USB drive RX and adapter RX on USB drive TX).


Once done, connect the cable to the computer and start the “Flash Loader Demo” software.

Select the right COM port and press Next.

NOTE (26/02/14) : If you have some difficulties to make the connection between the device and the software, you can try to issue a reset to the emulator. To do this connect during 1 second the « RST » signal (present at the right of the RX signal)  to the ground. Don’t disconnect the RX/TX & Power wires during this operation. Once done start again the software.
Also to make sure that your serial adapter is working correctly, you can try a loopback test : use a terminal software and connect the rx & tx wires of the adapter together : if you get an echo of what you send to the terminal, the loopback test is working !

If the connection to the device is working you will get this screen :

Since the Gotek firmware is protected against the read, the software ask you to remove the protections. This will erase the flash and the firmware shipped with the device will be lost. Please note that this operation cannot be reverted !

Press “Remove Protection”

Press « OK »

Press “Next”.

Press “Next”.

Select the firmware HEX file and correct the settings according to this screenshot (if needed).

Then press “Next” -> The flash process begin (Take 1/2 minutes).

Once you got this last window, the device is ready : You can disconnect all wires and connect the emulator into your Amiga. 🙂
Don’t forget to move the jumper to the « S0 » position to replace DF0.

NOTE (21/12/17) : The drive can also be flashed with an usb cable. I will describe this method soon.

BUT HOW THIS IS POSSIBLE ? TELL ME MORE ! WHAT IS INSIDE THESE DRIVES ?

The Gotek drives use a powerful Cortex ARM based STM32 MCU working at 72Mhz with lots of timers with DMA support, which make the job somewhat easy. For instance, this MCU only need 0.5 ms (500us) to MFM-encode an Amiga sector, with all the parity checksums computation. DMA and timers are used to stream out the MFM flux so almost no MCU time is used for this task. The MCU is free to do others job in the same time (prepare the next sector).  Thanks to this, all is done in realtime and no extra buffer is needed to precompute/generate the track.

The write process also use DMA and a timer block to capture the incoming flux. Once captured some functions find the sectors into the flux, decode  and check the sectors (parity checking) and write back the data to the ADF on the USB stick (if the parity is good 😉 ).

As many ARM based MCU this one have a bootloader in ROM allowing the Flash programming through various interfaces, which make this project possible.
Regarding the firmware, less than the half of the Flash space is actually used.

Here is the Gotek drive’s schematic :

FULL RESOLUTION SCHEMATIC HERE.

PCB – TOP side

FULL RESOLUTION TOP PCB HERE.

PCB – BOTTOM side

FULL RESOLUTION BOTTOM PCB HERE.

Inside the BOX :

FULL RESOLUTION HERE.

As you can see there is a lot of possible further hardware and software development with these devices ! 🙂

I WANT TO SEE THE DRIVE WORKING !

Ok, here is some pictures :


A USB Stick is not enough ? Then go for a IDE/SATA Hard Disk  😉


SD Card ? , Compact Flash ?,  xD card ?, MS card ? -> Just use the right adapter ! 🙂


Work in progress 😉

DOWNLOAD

– The STMicroelectonics Flash loader software : stsw-mcu005.zip

– The new firmware HEX file :  cortexamigafloppyemulator_v105a.docx (Change the file extension .docx to .zip !)

1.0a – Initial release
1.01a 2K14/02/15 – Interrupts priorities changed, I/O latency reduced -> Better stability.
1.02a 2K14/02/15 – I/O latency reduced (again).
1.03a 2K14/03/02 – Up to 999 images pre-selection support, some graphicals glitches corrected, keyboard delay is now timer driven, Amiga MFM encoding corrected, Index timing corrected, track length corrected, disk change delay set to 4seconds, Firmware version printed at startup.
Note : Both selector.adf and firmware need to be updated !
1.04a 2K14/03/05 – 2 digits/74HC164 based 7 segments display support added. 4 seconds disk change delay disabled at power up and at the selector exit.
1.04b 2K14/03/08 Selector.adf update : Floppy Emulator auto-detection : Can now control the emulator on DF0/DF1/DF2/DF3…
1.05a 2K14/03/30 Selection problem with fast machines corrected, archive flag issue corrected, Spurious track step workaround added, Fast forward image selection : keep the button pressed to speed up the increment/decrement. Press both buttons to jump to the selector.adf / « 000 » image.

2K17/12/21 : New alternate file selector available : SELECTOR.ADF (From the HxC project)

H.M

Unless specified, all softwares, binaries and informations provided on this page was written by Hervé Messinger.

Copyright  (C) 2013-2021 Hervé Messinger.

940 réflexions sur “Transform the Gotek Floppy Emulator into an Amiga Floppy emulator”

  3. Hi I note you have used a SATA to USB connection and hooked in a hard drive to this unit my query is what is the maximum hard drive size it can take and what can it effectively format that hard drive to?

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  5. hello how are you? I am Gilmar and I am in Brazil
    I loved your emulator worked perfectly in my AMiga’s
    But I got an Issue in AMIGA4000T, it begins to charge and when it enters the Desktop to loading ..
    I know help me? I have tested other and even other friends and it worked perfect, but in A4000T ..
    Thank you for your attention.
    Gilmar.

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  6. Hello. Does this cover other Shugart based drives, such specifically as the Ensoniq EPS Sampling Keyboard? This would include the 800kb size, and .EFE/.GKH extensions?

    Any help would be great! Thanks – Joe

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  7. Bonjour Hervé, j’ai acheté un lecteur Gotek pour mon synthé Korg Trinity et malheureusement, celui-ci ne fonctionne pas correctement. Pas de problème pour formater une clé USB et y ajouter des fichiers. Cependant, pour que mon synthé arrive à charger un disque, il faut que la clé soit insérée avant la mise sous tension de celui-ci. Ensuite il faut choisir le disque voulu et le charger. Pas de problème. Là où ça se corse, c’est lorsque je souhaite charger un autre disque sur la même clé USB. Je sélectionne le disque désiré et là…ben y a un os ! Le synthé ne rafraîchit pas le disque et impossible de charger, il ne « voit » le changement de disque. J’ai bien essayé de retirer la clé USB et de la réinsérer mais rien à faire. La seule solution c’est de redémarrer le synthé avec la clé et sélectionner le nouveau disque à charger. L’interface du lecteur de disquette du synthé est de type IBM et non Shugart. Peut-être est-ce le problème ? Auriez-vous une solution pour remédier à ce problème ? Est-ce que le firmware que vous avez développez pour l’Amiga pourrais fonctionner pour mon synthé ? J’ai essayé de mettre des jumpers mais pas mieux voire pire. Et la doc du Gotek est bien pauvre ! Une solution possible serait de flasher le lecteur Gotek avec le firmware HxC. Qu’en pensez-vous ? Dans l’attente de vous lire. Cordialement.

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  10. Hi Hervé! Is it posiible to obtain the source of the selector in order to enhace it with a selection menu like « kodi », showing a frame of the game or a description?
    Thanls

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  11. Nice work dude! Really cool! Thanks to the gotek unit I can see many demos and play games without floppys.
    I’m thinking about make a version of the selector showing a little image of the game/demo and some sort of text with the description, but i need some docs/info about how to manage and interact with gotek drive. Can u help me? is it possible to get the source of the selector (no source of firmware is needes, that’s your big secret, i know.) It would be nice to select a game showing an image and description, filter by name or game type… just like kodi with films. I’m coder, and i would like to contribute your work with some enhacements to the selector program.
    Thanks in advance

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  13. For anyone experiencing difficulties programming the Gotek from a USB serial cable (esp. « Device Not Recognized » errors), take heart. The TX output on the Gotek appears to be an open drain output, meaning that it will not work correctly without a pullup resistor. It is possible that some USB serial cables have this built into them, which is why some people have had no problems. However, if you are using a common Prolific-based cable, they do not have a pullup on the input side and will not work when wired up as Hervé shows above.

    To fix this, you need only add a 10k resistor between the TX pin and the 3.3V pin on the Gotek board. In my case, I simply soldered an 0805 SMT resistor on the underside of the PC board connecting these two pins, but any method will work so long as the Gotek TX pin is pulled up to 3.3V through a suitable-valued resistor. As soon as I did that, the STM programming software immediately recognized the bootloader and worked flawlessly at the suggested 115200 baud.

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  16. Hi

    Congratulations for your firmware in its actual state.
    Your great work permits to enjoy Gotek device on my so old A500 (standard configuration: only one 512 MB memory extension board).

    After this brilliant success, I tried to get same pleasure on my A1200 (massively customized).
    I experienced an issue with selector.adf and my Blizzard A1260.
    This piece of software is unable to run together with my Blizzard A1260: Guru Meditation occurs.
    By disabling my Blizzard A1260 all is working fine.

    It’s just so sad ADF selector software is incompatible with such common extension board on Amiga scene.
    Is it a ADF selector software issue with 68060 processor as it was so often the case with other software by the past?

    As I see last comment was written on 2015/01/23, I don’t expect too much 😦 (at least a reply please).
    Maybe you decided to not spend anymore time on this project: it would be a very bad news…

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  17. Hi Herve,

    I’m interested into adding i2c LCD screen support on your firmware, I’ve got some coding experience with the STM32. I would do this for free on my spare time, let me know if you’re interested.

    Cheers,

    Jonas

    PS: You can contact me here or by mail if you want (and we also may speak French if you like)

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  18. Bonjour, je n’arrive pas à connecter le lecteur au PC pour flasher la ROM. j’ai toujours le même message : « no response from the target, the boot loader cannot be started. Please verify the boot mode configuration and the flash protection status. Reset your device then try again ». Pour moi les contacts sont bien fait sur le lecteur. Mon cable est normalement en 5v, il y avait une sortie 3,3v dessus, j’ai donc tenter en 3,3v à la place du 5v mais rien n’y fait …
    Que faire ?

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  19. HELP
    Bonjour, je n’arrive pas à connecter le lecteur au PC pour flasher la ROM. j’ai toujours le même message : « no response from the target, the boot loader cannot be started. Please verify the boot mode configuration and the flash protection status. Reset your device then try again ». Pour moi les contacts sont bien fait sur le lecteur. Mon cable est normalement en 5v, il y avait une sortie 3,3v dessus, j’ai donc tenter en 3,3v à la place du 5v mais rien n’y fait …
    Que faire ?

    Réponse

  20. Hi all,
    I have some issues with some adf games: sometimes they don’t start, they crash or there are problems with disk swap. I tried to use some other adf files but in some case I solved the problem but in other cases they not working too, like Jaguar XJ220, Flashback, Desert Strike and Final Fight.
    Some ideas? Thanks

    Réponse

  21. Hi,

    so … what’s the right command for flashing in CMD?

    I only removed the write protection using:

    STMFlashLoader.exe -c –pn 16 -p –drp

    c:\Cortex>STMFlashLoader.exe -c –pn -p –drp
    Opening Port [OK]
    disabling read protection [KO]

    After this i wrote this (the only thing i found in the net):

    STMFlashLoader.exe -c –pn 16 -i STM32F1_Connectivity-line_128K -d –fn fw.hex –v (i changed the fw.hex with the firmware CortexAmigaFloppyEmulator_1.05a.hex).

    What « STM32F1_Connectivity-line_128K » stands for?

    I only get:

    Opening Port [OK]
    This version is not intended to support the [STM32F1_Connectivity-line_128K] target

    What could be wrong and what is the correcht commandline command to flash?

    Thanks.

    Réponse

  23. Hi,

    on the last Picture is a CPC, does that mean your Firmware support the Nec 765 too?
    If yes: How do you select these Floppyimages on Nec 765 based Computers? (Like CPC, PC, KC 85/x,…)

    Greetings from Germany – and sorry for bad English…

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  24. Thank you so much for bringing Gotek to Amiga! Excellent work on the firmware.

    However, it would be great if Selector could be released as open source. It could use some improvements. For instance, (1) the current graphics mode is too low which results in the font being too large which results in filenames not fitting the screen (can’t even see « Disk # » on many TOSEC files, not to mention virus infected tags « [v …] » which are always outside of the screen), (2) it seems Selector is reading all subdirectories without reason making me wait for a minute whenever I enter a games subdirectory which contains only 27 subdirectories and no files.

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  26. I think my experience will be helpful to other people. If your usb to ttl is a prolific one (2303 ha/xha) and you have problems to recognize the device on Windows 7 all the problems were gone when I tried on a xp 32 bits notebook. The only thing is that you maybe have to reset de device like the guide explains. And that’s all. Connected and flashed in less than 5 minutes. I could not test it yet because I don’t have my amiga right here but the flash is done now 😀

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  30. Personally, i think this is one of the most important developments on the Amiga in years. It has brought a low-cost, effective and easy solution to users who just want their games. It would be beautiful to see continuing development on it, or a release to a FOSS licence so that other can continue the work. I would also advocate a donation button because i for one would donate and i see several other comments from people who would donate. Herve, don’t stress on the profiteers out there – we can’t stop pricks being pricks. I was going to buy one of the pre-made ones when i first heard about this device, but a friend told me you were upset by the whole thing. Of course, i had no idea. I checked and you were – so i did it myself. My two points regarding this are: a). There’s plenty of good people too, and b). If it was FOSS, it actually makes it clear that these guys are ripping people off. If everyone knows it’s FOSS, it’s probably less likely the profiteers will profit. Further, look at WinUAE. Could you imagine it being what it is without open source behind it? You’ve started something great, and it saddens me to see it stiffled because of the actions of a few unscrupulous players. You’ve no way to know what kind of percentage they are. Abuse them, ignore them, but don’t let them stop you, or others, from continuing the fabulous work done to date.

    Thank you 🙂

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  31. I am Mounty, an Amiga hardware developer. I’m thinking of creating my own version of the Gotek firmware for the Amiga, but with some enhancements. What do you think?

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  32. Hi Herve, are you still working on it? Can you release source code (to github or just zip file)? I’d like to learn from it and try to add HD floppy support. Also I’d like to connect i2c 16×2 HD44780 display or more buttons and add support to firmware. This look like nice STM32F105 based board. And BTW could you add your e-mail and/or paypal to the version.txt in the zip? Thanks.

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  34. Took a bit to get one flashed, but that is probably more becuase of the cable/etc and drivers.

    QUESTION: Is it possible to use a verison of the SELECTOR program from a hard drive? Say I wanted to be able to juggle the ADF volumes… I copied it to the hard drive, but it only has the Save & Restart mode, I can’t just exit selector and use the new assignments without a reboot.

    Is there already a way to do it?

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  35. Any news on CPC and/or Atari version??

    I hope that you will release the SW for CPC in some kind of way.
    (eg. pay per serila number or something similar)

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  36. Hi cortex !

    And thanks a lot for your hard work. I’ve just revived an old Amiga 500 thanks to you. I had no way to transfer my adfs back to floppy (I found at least 40+ dead floppies among some 200+ sitting for more than 20 years in those plastic boxes, you know… 🙂 ) Now it’s history

    Cheers

    Browny

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  37. Superb work. Bought me a Gotek one week ago and tried alot of Amiga-software in last days (about 100 Games and 30 Demos). Apart from « Jesus on E`s » Demo everything worked like it should. The Jesus Demo needed two floppys because it always switch between DF0 and DF1 while loading and running. Tried it with an external diskdrive and a real disk2 in DF1. But it hangs and dont recognize the disk in DF1. Seems like this Demo has a special loader, because i tried other demos where i also put a real disk under in DF1 and the other demos load normally also from the real disk then. Apart Jesus-Demo everything worked and this is really great for this price that the Gotek cost. You did very good job with your Amiga firmware here. I tried also copying between real disks and adf-Images. It worked for my from adf-to-disk, even with verify, but it dont worked from disk-to-adf. There always verify-errors came and the adf-copy of the real disk then dont work. But this way, copying is not needed very often, much more often a user will write an adf to a disk and this works. The using of the selector.adf is also nice. So, congratulation to your work.

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  39. Very, Very, Very sad to hear of those who are, effectively, stealing your work. It is worse because many in the community will suffer if you stop your great work. But your decision is yours, I can’t criticize what you do if it is your choice. But I would also be willing, if you had a PayPal button or address listed, to make a small donation to help show appropriate appreciation for your work.

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  40. Hi, Herve,

    Your work on the Amiga Gotek firmware is fantastic. 😉

    I’ve discovered that the Gotek drives can be re-flashed without needing a serial-to-TTL adapter at all – it suddenly struck me that most of these modern ARM chips have a USB bootloader inside…

    So, all you need it a Type-A to Type-A USB cable, put the jumper the 3V3 and BOOT0 pins, plug in the USB cable, then move the jumper to the 3V3 and USART1_TX pins, then wait a while and the PC should find the STM32. 🙂

    I then simply use the dfuse package and the load.bat file from this Hackaday article to re-flash the Gotek…

    https://hackaday.io/project/4139-stm32-dfu-file-converter

    I’m working on writing my own STM32 firmware for supporting other types of machine, but I’ve never really done much ARM coding. I’ve done plenty of projects with PIC / AVR / FPGA though.

    Of course, you are not obliged to release your code at all, but I was wondering if you are still intending to release any code for the Amiga or CPC version eventually? It would be a great help to the retro community.

    I know a lot of people are still profiting from your efforts though, which is a shame.
    I don’t intend on profiting from you firmware, and I will be releasing my code as well if I can manage to get anything working.

    Even if you could spare some time to explain how some of your code works, that would be fantastic. No need to worry if the code needs tidying up or anything, as it obviously works great.

    I can’t figure out if you’re using the Wake UP function for the DSELn pin, and how you’re buffering the data for each track / side?

    Are you using the interrupt routine to read the new track data from USB every time you see a STEPn falling-edge?

    I have some basic USART output working now, and have started listing the pin numbers etc…

    // Floppy signals / SPI Flash / LEDs on PORT B…
    //
    #define DIRn_IN 0

    #define JUMPER_JC_IN 1 // Internal Pull-up should be enabled!

    #define READYn_OUT 3 // Push-pull (drives 74HC04 then FET).

    #define SIDEn_IN 4

    #define WPTn_OUT 5 // Push-pull (drives 74HC04 then FET).
    #define TRK00n_OUT 6 // Push-pull (drives 74HC04 then FET).
    #define DSKCHGn_OUT 7 // Push-pull (drives 74HC04 then FET).
    #define INDEXn_OUT 8 // Push-pull (drives 74HC04 then FET).

    #define WGATEn_IN 9

    #define DISP_DIO_OUT 10
    #define LED1_PIN 10

    #define DISP_CLK_OUT 11
    #define LED3_PIN 11

    #define SPI_FLASH_CS 12
    #define SPI_FLASH_CLK 13
    #define SPI_FLASH_DO 14
    #define SPI_FLASH_DI 15

    This is as far as I’ve got for the main loop. lol…

    if ( !(GPIOC->IDR & 1<<BUT_UP_PIN) ) printf ("UP Button pressed!\n");

    I wonder how fast you have the STM32 running? 72MHz?

    Do you do the MFM encoding in the interrupt routine as well, or are you keeping a few tracks buffered that are higher / lower than the current track and are pre-encoded for MFM?

    I'll have a go at "porting" some code to drive the TM1651 display next…

    Regards,
    Ash.

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  41. First of all: Thank you very much for your brilliant and rock solid work!

    The following also might be related to mechjam’s question.

    I tried connecting the Emulator as df1 and the original drive as df0 inside an A500 with Kick 1.3, using a 34 pin cable with 3 connectors. This should work theoretically as SEL1 signal is present at the A500 internal bus connector. This worked partially: selector did NOT work but already assigned adfs worked at the Workbench as if they were real disks. Nice!

    So I tried connecting the Emulator as df0 and the original drive as df1. The Emulator worked fine. But the original drive is not recognized.

    Asked google. And finally remembered: Amiga requires floppies to send drive type IDs. But the drives themselfes never did. C= implemented these ID generators inside the Amigas, at least for df0 for all Amigas and for df1 in the A2000 (via jumper 301).

    So in order to have the real drive act as df1 inside an A500 one would have to build a little logic which generates an 880k floppy drive type ID, like it is done inside the external drives, right?

    So here is a feature request for the Emulator: It would be nice to have a jumper which enables the Emulator to send 880k drive type for df1, even if set up as df0. So that the Emu would hijack the plain drive’s ID generation.

    And this also might be the solution for the A1200 made by Amiga Technologies: It does NOT have the ID generatzor for df0. And the Emulator does not send it when set up as df0? @mechjam: Does the Emu work as df1 at your A1200?

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  45. Hi Herve.
    I’m not an Amiga user but I’m really impressed with your work.
    I would to have the software adapted to support other formats in particular BBC Micro and RISC OS.
    I am not expecting you to do the adaption and would be expecting to pay for access to your work. Could you email me at chris@cjemicros.co.uk please. Chris

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  48. Hi,

    it seems that I might have come too late to this thread, which would be a real shame.

    I have only just purchased my first Amiga and quite a few people recommended the Gotek drive with Hervé’s great firmware. (I have just purchased a « bare » Gotek and will flash it myself as Hervé intended).

    I just wanted to add my support to others that have expressed thanks for Hervé’s great work and beg that he can be persuaded to continue to develop / support this great tool.

    I can totally understand how pi**ed off he might he when he sees what I imagine to be hundreds of Goteks being sold with his firmware installed by dishonest ebay sellers, but I am hoping that we can encourage Hervé to revisit this project.

    Having read the whole thread here, I know that Hervé is not comfortable with people selling Goteks with non-approved firmware, i.e., HIS firmware, I was just hoping that we could find a way to convince him to release updated firmware for genuine users, rather than ebay sellers.

    I realise that this might involve time and effort that he can’t spare, but perhaps forcing people to register to download the firmware and sign a « no distribution » agreement would go some way to getting rid of the flea bay maggots!

    Anyway, as much as I hope that I am wrong, it appears that the project has been put on long term hold, if not actually abandoned, but . . . . . .

    Hervé, if you are still following this thread. please consider returning to development of this fantastic work – there are lots of people who would greatly appreciate it!

    regards
    Dave

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  50. I have problems with my 68060 (cyberstorm) in an A4000. The same drive works perfect in my A1200/020. With the A4000, it seems to boot, but the A4000 reboots before the bootloader shows up.
    How can I fix this ? ( disabling caches didn’t work)

    Réponse

    • j’ajoute un petit detail technique.
      certains adaptateurs USB/TTL vendus sur ebay (CP2102) sont en « open collector » pour pouvoir etre utilisés au choix en 5V ou 3,3V.
      Il est necessaire de relier le TX et le RX au 3,3 V à l’aide d’une resistance de 2,2 K à 4,7K pour avoir un fonctionnement correct.
      Ceci est realisable directement sur le bornier de sortie de l’adaptateur si il possede une borne +3,3V
      En esperant que celà pourra aider certains.
      cordialement
      Gerard

      Réponse

  53. Hello and thank you for this great work, please let me make a donation, have you set up a paypal page for this? Does it was an hard work, could it be somewhere adapted to support .DSK’s Amstrad CPC disk images? thanks

    Réponse

  55. For the « next generations of home programmers » 🙂 I had similar problems with « UNRECOGNIZED DEVICE », as described by some above. Nothing proposed helped. I even used external power source to gotek board taken from my loved Amiga! No success. Hundreds of tries.

    So I decided to interface serial with level adapter (5V->3V3) since my cable was 5V standard. As written by the author, this cable should work, ST32 have 5V tolerance. No extra level interfacing needed….. But… I seemed to be a problem in my case.

    After connecting by simple level converter (2x2cm board with some diodes) my programming worked like a charm! From the first shoot!

    I think it’s a 5V vs 3V3 HI/LO voltage level issue. I should study it, but have no time. My Amiga is waiting for new drive!!!

    So, everybody having problem similar to mine, please try what suggested above or use 3V3 serial cable. It may save you some hours.

    Bee cool.

    Réponse

  57. Bonjour,

    J’essaye désespérément de faire communiquer le lecteur Gotek (SFRC922) avec l’application Flash Load Démonstrator. Mon câble série fonctionne bien (je l’utilise pour un Kim Uno), j’ai bien appliqué et suivi le mode opératoire.

    J’obtiens le message :
    « « No response from the target, the Boot loader can not be started. Please, verify the boot mode configuration and the flash protection status, Reset your device and try again… »

    J’ai bien testé les tensions, et vérifié que j’avais bien 3,3V à la sortie du régulateur.
    Pensant que mon lecteur était HS, j’en ai commandé un autre et j’ai refais les manip.

    Mais toujours le même problème.
    A priori, je ne suis pas le seul dans ce cas-là.

    Avez-vous une solution à me donner pour le faire fonctionner ?
    Merci.

    Réponse

  58. For anybody having issues with USB stick compatibility, there is a rather cheap alternative that is guaranteed to work. Purchase a « SD Micro SD MMC SDHC DV TF M2 MS Memory Card Reader to USB 2.0 Adapter ». It’s blue in colour and costs about $2. You can get a cheap Micro SD card for it and use that on the floppy drive emulator. I have tested three different cards and they all worked. They did NOT work with a different adapter, so make sure you’re getting the right one on ebay!

    Réponse

  59. For only 18€Drive+1.75€cable i can copy my disks in one usb memory, 1300 disks, i think i can add more and only wanna say a big THANKS to you. MERCI BEAUCOUP XD

    Réponse

  61. Well, that was not easy to figure out that someone would turn this ingenious idea into a business.
    Unemployment rates are everywhere, and if you know what 20 quid will mean to a poor fellow, you would no longer be surprised what these dudes are capable of to make ends meet. Another thing is that if they’re afraid of people, they can even do that in their dark cellar « workshops ». It’s called ‘Modern Times’ – face it.

    BTW nice Atari approach. However, I fear (and sense) you won’t be wanting to continue this because you’re afraid from even more money-grubbers on auction sites.

    Lastly, one technical detail:

    « – Tested on A500 & A600. Should work on all Amiga. »

    This is not quite true.
    Will fail on A1000s, due to their different hardware. Prove me wrong and get this to work on an A1000 everyone. Happy fiddling 😉

    Réponse

  65. Whoever first brought up that Prolific PL2303 USB UART is a complete moron. There are so many people having problems with that cheap device and all they’re told is that it’s a problem with their OS or cables or whatever. And they keep recommending that shitty USB-to-Serial interface. Idiots quoting idiots doesn’t make things better.

    Get yourself the cheapest device with an FTDI chip and you’re fine, no matter what. I used a Foca v2.2 that has never let me down. Even the cable based solutions (where the FTDI chip is built into the USB plug) are working nice and stable. Programmed hundreds of microcontrollers with this. The PL2303 didn’t even manage to work once.

    Have a nice day.

    Réponse

  67. Good day,

    First of all, thank you for your awesome work.
    I bought this fantastic device and i’m really happy to leave all old and broken floppies.
    But…i have one big problem, save disk!

    I make an example, I played sensible soccer again and I stared a new career, so when i put a blank adf(created by winuae) it was unrecognized by the gotek, so i create a new disk and save from winuae, inserted the usb again, try to save career and it worked! gotek recognized savedisk and i was able to save.
    But the problem is when i want to loadgame, I insert savedisk, the game recognized the disk because i can see all my savegames but when i load it it say me DISK ERROR…so i don’t understand what’s going on?
    I don’t know if I should make different procedures…
    Hope you can help me.

    Thank you in advance and sorry if my english isn’t perfect 🙂

    Best regards
    Fabrizio

    Réponse

  68. > « no resellers involved in this update. »
    > in fact it does.

    Unfortunately you can’t get rid of resellers. Chinese hardware is so cheap that you’ll be always chased by vultures looking to make a clean 50-100$ on top of your work. Sometimes they even publish fake machinery support lists, to push sales. Example: applications with nonstandard formats / multiformats, copy protected disks…

    Réponse

  69. Hi,
    i’ve got only one Amiga (A1200 from Amiga Technologies) that will not operate with the Gotek drive. All the others A600/A1200 by C=/A4000 works great with the drive.
    Any recommandations?

    Réponse

  71. Hi Hervé and Happy New Year!

    Thanks for the brilliant firmware for Amiga and sorry that greedy people ruined your projects. To help other flash the unit for themselves and avoid high priced ebay sellers, I made a video showing how to do it.

    Réponse

  74. Bonjour,

    Je vous présente mes meilleurs vœux pour la nouvelle année

    Merci beaucoup Herve pour votre travail.
    Mon Gotek fonctionne bien sur mon 1200.

    Pouvez-vous me dire svp où en est votre développement pour le CPC svp, les captures écrans sont alléchantes.

    Cdt.

    Réponse

  75. Herve,
    Just wanted to wish you a happy New Year!
    If you setup some kind of payment for your work, I’ll be glad to join… My friend reprogrammed a gotek drive for me and it is working just fine.

    Réponse

  77. I also had a lot of problems with Device Not Recognized errors. Tried on several USB ports, different speeds, resetting multiple times, etc.

    What finally worked was connecting in the following way:
    BOOT0 and 3.3v on drive jumpered together
    3v from the TTL to the 5v power plug on the drive <–This is the vital part
    RX to TX
    TX to RX
    5v from TTL = not connected
    Ground from TTL to VSS

    For some reason or another, the drive simply didn't want to work with 5v connected to it. I tried for a few days to get it to work. However, once 3.3v was connected to the 5v input, it worked the first try

    Réponse

  78. Having read your article with great interest it stopped me from ordering a Gotek Emulator from eBay, since I had assumed that an floppy emulator would work in place of a floppy drive in any situation whether it;s an industrial machine or a music keyboard midi player.

    I need to replace the floppy drive on a GEM WK Midi Arranger, probably similar to what’s fitted to Yamaha, Korg, Roland, Casio etc., how do I manage that with a Gotek Emulator straight from an eBay reseller?

    Your reply will be gratefully appreciated.

    Réponse

  79. Merci beaucoup pour le travail Hervé, j’espère que tu pourras continuer ton excellent projet et te protéger de tous les rapaces sur le web 😉
    Comme les autres, je serais aussi prêt à faire une donation pour ton projet ou à acheter le firmware si il le faut, ça fait gagner du temps à beaucoup de monde !

    Réponse

  81. I’ve been thinking lately.
    How about using a bigger resolution for the selector? allowing for more room to display the file names.
    Just a minor update to the selector, without any need to touch the firmware, no resellers involved in this update.

    Réponse

  82. Herve,

    I have a schmatic for the 2 digit display I could email to you but I need an email address for you to send it. I also have some more details on this device.

    Thank you,

    Sam

    Réponse

      • Hello Herve,

        Would you be interested in helping members of my non profit group rework the firmware in the Gotek units so that we can use these emulators in LeCroy Digital Storage Oscilloscopes that are out of support by LeCroy? Our group is the LeCroy_Owners_Group on Yahoo! groups here:

        https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/LeCroy_Owners_Group/info

        We have nearly 600 members that have these excellent DSO’s but the floppy drives for them are no longer available or repairable and the standard Gotek products will not work without hardware modification to handle the disk change line along with cable changes.

        The emulator needs to emulate a standard 1.44MB IBM format floppy drive. The multiple floppy feature is very handy and we have tested a modified drive and it works well but the added cost to do this in small quantites is significant.

        So if we had firmware/sourcecode that we could modify, we would be able to easily adapt the Gotek product to the scopes. Other solutions are simply too expensive for hobbyists to afford.

        You may contact me directly at:

        sam dot reaves at gmail dot com

        Just rework the above to a standard email address.

        Thank you for your time and consideration and Happy New Year!

        Sam

    • Hi Sam,
      have you any info on the exact differences of the three digit version and the two digit version? Earlier in the Comments somebody posted a schematic of the 2 digit display board(Somewhere around page 2). I just build a 2 digit display board but everything i get is garbage on it. Used the schematic posted here.
      Maybe this schematic is wrong. Maybe you could upload your schematic somewhere so we could compare both.
      Also @Herve: Do you have any check to decide to use the code for a 2 digit or a 3 digit display? As far as i can see there are no other differences between the 2 devices… Are there any additional Jumper settings? Or is the display connected to different pins on the cortex?

      Best Regards
      Ben

      Réponse

      • Hi Ben,

        The three digit may use entirely different firmware as it uses a single chip to drive the LED display. I believe that the hardware for the emulator board is identical. It also may be that the new chip hardware is compatible in some way. If you send me an email directly to:
        sam dot reaves at gmail dot com

        Just replace the dot and the at with the obvious.

        I will forward what I have.

        What I am trying to do with these emulators it to get them working on no longer LeCroy supported LeCroy Digital Storage Oscilloscopes with out requiring additional hardware.

        All the best.

        Sam

  84. First of all: many thanks for this fantastic thing! It works like a charm and was exactly what I was looking for!

    If you are using Linux, you can do the flashing by using stm32flash: https://code.google.com/p/stm32flash/

    Here the steps which are needed to do the flash (assuming /dev/ttyUSB0 is the path to your USB to serial adaptor):

    1) Disable Read-Protection:
    stm32flash -k -b 57600 /dev/ttyUSB0

    2) Disable Write-Protection:
    stm32flash -u -b 57600 /dev/ttyUSB0

    3) Do the flash:
    stm32flash -b 57600 /dev/ttyUSB0 -w CortexAmigaFloppyEmulator_1.05a.hex

    4) Result should be something like that:
    Using Parser : Intel HEX
    Interface serial_posix: 57600 8E1
    Version : 0x22
    Option 1 : 0x00
    Option 2 : 0x00
    Device ID : 0x0418 (Connectivity line)
    – RAM : 64KiB (4096b reserved by bootloader)
    – Flash : 256KiB (sector size: 2×2048)
    – Option RAM : 16b
    – System RAM : 18KiB
    Write to memory
    Erasing memory
    Wrote address 0x0800f5b0 (100.00%) Done.

    I had to set the transfer rate to 57600 since 115200 did not work properly.

    HTH

    Réponse

  85. Hi there,
    first of all, thank you for this genius piece of software.
    Works like a charm in my a500. I just got a question regarding the 2 digit display version. How do you determine in your Software if there is a 3 or 2 digit display? Do you differentiate at all or is the 2 digit display connected to different pins?
    I’m just aksing because i’ve got a Version without Display and would like to add one… and the 2 Digit version would be sufficent for me and also easier to build.

    Looking forward to hear from you
    Thanks in Advance
    Ben

    Réponse

  87. Cannon Fodder save game disks dont work. Tried them all from tosec archive.

    Please help.

    Setup donation by paypal. Many amiga fans would like to donate and support further development.

    Réponse

  88. I love your Cortex firmware! I just flashed my Gotek with it. It is so awesome. Support for HD-disks would be nice feature. Amiga can read HD floppies too. *wink-wink* 😉

    This is just so awesome, easy and cheap way to get Amiga back to life.

    Réponse

  90. @Herve Thanks for your great work. I received Gotek yesterday, soldered extra pins and flashed as you described. It works like charm. Please open donation Paypal so we can support you. And please, keep up your work on firmware because of us, regular Amiga enthusiasts. Thanks.

    Réponse

    • Yes it is possible to do this. I have a AMiga 1000 with Gotek in an external case and a switch to make external drive DF0. I added the image file to the USB stick and selector using a Amiga 500. Boots perfectly to Kickstart 1.3

      Réponse

  92. Firstly I wanted to say thanks to Herve and his great effort. Thanks to you I can now use my 500 again! It’s a shame to hear about those people making profit off your hard work that you have done for free, and I truly hope that you can find the motivation to continue your project.

    So, I have managed to successfully flash the gotek drive with the latest firmware, and I got it working perfectly with 2 a500. However I cannot manage to run any add images on my a1200😞
    It’s one of the latest ones without the commodore logo (was it Amiga international?).
    When I connect the gotek, I get to the insert floppy screen, the display on the drive is on a number, but the Amiga doesn’t seem to recognise that I have inserted a disk. Even on 000 still nothing.
    If I connect a proper floppy drive, then physical floppy disks are recognised fine.
    Anyone has any advice? I really want to use my a1200 😞
    Are there any known compatibility issues with certain 1200 models?

    Réponse

  93. Good work; is there any way to save original firmware ? I have one of this GOTEK drive but it is 720 KB, that is harder to find and with more expensive prices.

    Réponse

  94. Hey I’ve got an idea (which you might have already had). Since you have 3 jumpers (JA, JB and JC) available directly connected to the processor and more then half the flash space available you might be able to write a more generic firmware for Amiga, Atari and CPC (and maybe normal PC floppy) which will behave for the specific machine according to that jumper configuration.

    (disclaimer: I give you this idea for free and you can do whatever you want with it)

    P.S.: Do you accept paypal donations?

    Réponse

  96. Thanks for the firmware. I just bought a Gotek drive and flashed your firmware, so thank you very much. I can understand why you might be a bit annoyed at others selling the firmware flashed on eBay; however, if you really intend to give it away for free then it shouldn’t matter too much. I’m certain that your blog site has gotten numerous hits within the Amiga community and its very well known that you are the inventor of the firmware. Would you consider releasing your firmware as open source on GitHub? The Amiga community is not so big, I don’t think anyone will get too rich off of selling this firmware. By releasing it open-source many people, myself included, can contribute to and make improvements to the firmware. If people want the latest version of the firmware, they will learn to flash their own drives. You’ve done a great service for the Amiga community, I hope you consider releasing the firmware as open source, so the Amiga community can continue to share and develop your firmware.

    Réponse

  99. Maybe a tip for non-working USB pens :
    I had only one working pen, a never used one. All my other non-working pens were formatted with Linux (vfat ?). After formatting this pens with XP, they ALL work.
    Give a try !

    Réponse

  100. Great work, a very cheap and great solution but the selector adf is VERY buggy. I have the latest firmware, but it constantly freezes on init menu, in root menu, on shutdown and on startup. This is driving me mad, can you fix this please? 😀

    Kind regards

    Réponse

  101. I am thinking of buying white version on e-bay and do some DIY work at home. Any particular version I should be looking? I found this one: http://goo.gl/cew4y9
    Are new Firmware versions planned?

    I plan to use it on Amiga 1200 as internal, main floppy. Is it possible to emulate several drives (to avoid switching multiple ADF-s?

    Thanks,

    Réponse

  102. Hi.
    I just wanted to ask if you have any idea what happened so that after flashing my Gotek device the display is not working anymore? Everything else is working fine…
    I looked for the connectors, i mesured (still 3.3 Volts), i double flashed it, with firmware 1.4 and 1.5, no way. The 3 digit display still stays dark…I checked the segments with a 3 Volt battery, they are ok…
    So, maybe someone can help? my email: zargh@gmx.de

    Réponse

  104. First of all… thanks a lot for your great work!!

    I found a bug…
    Some games need to have the adf files write protected flag being set. If not, the adf files become unusable and it ends in read errors and Dos 0 messages.
    For ex. Dungeon Master. Set the write prot.. flag and you are fine.

    This is not a problem if you know it. But here comes the nasty bug…
    There is one first game i found, that alters it’s adf files even with write protected set!
    The game is Monkey Island 1. I tried the following…
    Loaded the game and used the first chance to write a savegame to an empty adf.
    Changed disk to the first game disk as wanted by the game.
    After a restart of the Amiga the game doesn’t load any further than the icon in workbench…
    The adf became corrupted…
    I found after comparing the md5 checksums to the adf i have on the harddisk on pc.

    Réponse

  105. Hi there. Has anyone had success with actually using disk swap buttons during playing multi-disk games? Also any luck with making save disks for some games like Cannon Fodder?
    I have had limited success with using disk swap buttons. Have tried about 10 games. They seem to register the swap but then just hang there not reading the adf image. Have tried Cannon Fodder, Another world and a few others. I am running the latest 1.05a firmware and loader adf image. Some mention to re-flash my drive but I just don’t see how this would help if the original flash verifies and confirms it is fine.
    Is there a limitation with the file name size or something else?
    Thanks

    Réponse

  106. Hello,

    I got myself an Amiga 500 and installed a Gotek floppy emulation drive on it. All games work on it without any issues, but one of my favourite games doesn’t work. Lost Patrol. When the game asks for disk 2 i can’t continue because the disk wont load. Anyone know what the problem could be? I have tried many different ADF files.

    Réponse

  108. I’ve tried to flash my Gotek by using a crappy Profilic USB-TTL converter without success. So far I’ve tried a couple of different computers and operating systems without success. I am starting to think that something may be wrong with the emulator itself. Does the Arm7 chip on your Gotek emulator get really hot? Mine gets almost too hot to touch just if the the FDD cable is inserted!

    Réponse

  110. Will not load arcade pool, tower assault and body blows galactic adf’s on tosec on an A500 1mb – maybe also on other amigas. Cracker’s custom loading routine maybe confuses firmware. Also mounts different adf’s in some cases, e.g soccer kid The game cannot start because 2nd disk is not recognized.. Cannot copy actual disk from external floppie df1: to blank mounted adf with xcopy or any other tool. Some games require disk to be write protected (manchester united europe) so they wont load.

    Réponse

  111. I just received my gotek and will try that right away !

    I was wondering, would it be possible to modify a firmware for it to work with Atari ST ?

    Thanks !

    Réponse

  112. Herve I really love this! It’s brought my Amiga 500 out of retirement!

    One problem I’m having is that multi-disk games don’t detect the 001 to 002 swap (or wherever disk 2 may be). Also if I boot on a non-bootable floppy position and change to a bootable floppy number during the « insert disk » screen it does not detect a disk swap. So I feel like I’ve neglected something since no one else seems to have the same trouble. What would cause an in-game disk swap to go unrecognized no matter how many times I click « retry »?

    Réponse

  113. I just purchased a pre-flashed one, having a strange problem. Burned two usb sticks, it wouldn’t recognise them, and they were useless afterwards on the PC as well. Might be a unit problem but still…

    Réponse

  115. Hi!

    I bought a Gotek Floppy Emulator and tried to flash it with a PL2303 USB to serial. The PL2303 works fine but when i try to flash the floppy emulator i get a error saying:

    « No response from the target, the Boot loader can not be started. Please, verify the boot mode congfiguration and the flash protection status, Reset your device and try again… »

    The emulator is a Gotek SFRC922 and I have tried all the tips in this comments many times, still no results. Do you have any tips to get it working? Thanks for the hard work!

    Réponse

  116. Hello,

    First of all, thank you Hervé for this incredible work!

    To anyone able to help:
    20 years after selling my first Amiga (A600), I have recently bought an Amiga 500 (mb rev5) and I would like to use this floppy emulator since floppies are starting to be difficult to handle (old and unreliable), moreover my internal floppy has died recently… :-(.

    Can anyone help me confirm that the following devices are ok to use the emulator?
    => Flash device: http://www.ebay.fr/itm/PL2303HX-Cable-Adaptateur-Convertisseur-Module-USB-Vers-RS232-TTL-Pour-Arduino-/400545942205 (driver provided by seller is Prolific 1.7.0 directly from Prolific site)
    => http://www.ebay.fr/itm/SFR1M44-U100-USB-Emulateur-Lecteur-de-Disquette-Pour-Machine-Textile-Gris-/281285768585

    Regarding the Gotek drive, I’ve read in the comments that Gotek may block one day the ability to reflash an emulator. Has anyone faced this so far?

    Thank you all for your support and help.

    Réponse

  117. Hi all .. then I come to the point I took Gotek then the programmer .. soldered connectors .. but when AVADO to program it .. I put the jumper on the boot0 e3.3v..ma nothing scheduling program does not recognize it .. auks I tried resttando ..but nothing always the same problem. the Gotek are two .. I tried with 2 pc with 64bit win8.1 and a pc with xp..ma nothing someone can give me a help ..
    thanks

    Réponse

  118. Hello everyone I need help
    bought a 2 Gotek and a programmer, only that the Gotek are not recognized I followed the guide, boot0 3.3v jumper, rx and tx but nothing either, also tried with reset.
    use windows 8.1 64bit, test efettuato also win XP32bit but nothing.

    Réponse

  120. Je rencontre un problème lors de l’écriture par secteur dans un fichier ADF émulant une disquette. Je m’explique. J’utilise X-Copy (testé avec plusieurs versions) pour faire une image d’une disquette réelle vers une disquette émulée, en utilisant la copie de secteur par secteur. Le problème, c’est que l’image est inutilisable. D’ailleurs j’ai toujours des erreur « 8 » dans X-Copy lors de la vérification de l’écriture. Idem pour le formatage. J’ai essayé avec X-Copy et le WB. Les disquettes virtuelles (ADF) ne sont pas bonnes. Testé avec plusieurs clés USB en FAT32. Je suis en version 1.05a avec le gotek en DF1: sur un A2000.
    Si quelqu’un a des infos pour contourner les problème, je suis preneur. Merci par avance.

    Et félicitations pour le boulot qui a été réalisé ! 🙂

    Réponse

  121. Hi,

    By mistake I bought an gotek floppy emulator already flashed with this new firmware.

    But I’m not using the emulator on amiga, I’m using it on a sampler (mpc 2000) so I need flash back to original firmware… can anyone help me to get the original firmware ?

    Thanks and regards,
    Joao Pacheco

    Réponse

  122. Thanks so much for the great work, it is so easy to flash the drive yourself I have no idea why some would pay to get on preflashed from a profiter. The only way I would buy one preflashed would be direct from Herve, just to support his great work.

    Réponse

  123. Probably the easier way of mitigating the abuse may be releasing two versions of the firmware: One, for the normal people, showing a big warning and asking the user to contact you if has bought a unit with the firmware installed, and a second one to be sent to licensed (paying) sellers with a seller id recorded on it, and to be recorded protected on devices. Or something like that… you get the idea, don’t you? The seller version can be embedded in a custom programming software which adds a serial number to the units and count the number of licensed units produced… as complicated as you prefer…

    Anyway… The only one winning with all this mess now is the one selling the other simulated drives much expensive, as it keeps being the only viable option for Ataris and Amstrad/Spectrum. The loosing part are the users you wanted to help in the first place.

    Being me one of those users all I have to say is thank you, thank you, thank you… What you have already done for us is humongous, and even if you decide to end further developments of the firmware for all that happened, we’ll still be in debt with you.

    Réponse

  124. Big thanks for this great work.
    Today, I got my Gotek drive working in my Amiga 500. First, I had some problems with flashing the firmware unter Windows 7 / 64bit, but with an older XP based computer I was finally successful. If there’s an option (paypal donation, …), to support and honor your great work, please let me know.

    Réponse

  125. Bonjour Hervé.
    Un grand merci pour votre flash AMIGA.
    Fonctionne très bien sur mon A500, clé USB maxell 16GB NTFS.
    Par contre sur A1200 en allant dans le boot menu en maintenant les 2 boutons de la souris, je n’ai pas l’option DF1 qui s’affiche ( gotek installé dans un boitier de drive externe Amiga jumper sur S1 ).J’aurais voulu pouvoir booté en DF1 avec le gotek par facilité de branchement, mais le choix n’apparait pas dans le menu. Est ce mon interface de drive externe qui n’est pas compatible, pourtant elle fonctionnait avec un drive 3″5. Merci. FRED

    Réponse

  126. Just some reminds about USB sticks format and partitions
    Some sticks are in « superfloppy » USB-FDD mode, other in USB-ZIP, and at last, in USB-HDD mode.

    Diferences are:
    -USB-FDD: No partition table. Sector zero is the first « partition » sector, as floppys but with FAT16/32

    -USB-ZIP: Partition table at sector zero, unique primary partition defined as 4th partition.

    -USB-HDD: Partition table at sector zero, unique primary partition defined as 1st partition. Posibility to define multiple partitions (primaries and logicals)

    Don’t know if HM’s firmware works with all the cases. You can use RMPrep USB to format between these 3 options, maybe forcing USB-HDD does the magic.

    Réponse

  127. Flashed the latest 1.05, and put the gotek into an Amitech silent external drive. The gotek must be set to S0 (df0) in this drive to work as DF1. DF0 is a HXC2001. Setting the Gotek to S1 the wb comes up with a DF1:???? device. I can boot from the DF1, but the selector software tries to program the DF0 (HXC2001) and fails. Only solution is to disconnect the HXC2001 (DF0) and boot DF1, the the selector software finds DF1 (shows in the GUI).

    Réponse

  128. @hervemessinger Greetings From Sunny Sweden!
    I admire your work tremendously and have flashed in total 3 Goteks myself ( Intention to use with my Amiga 500, 600 and 1200. Lately we had to cover a family members medical bills so i decided to sell off my Goteks flashed with your FW on it for the price i purchased them for and rounded up approx 4 euros per drive. The persons whom puschased these are Amiga fans aswell and we were all wondering if we could perhaps send a PayPal donation your way for showing pur appriciation and to keep the spirits high.

    I have no intention to mass flash drivers and sell for a big profit as i have seen others do on ebay and other such sites. But a small fee for the time i take to solder pins, and flash the units and say split the extra profit your way at least i think would be a great idea for those whom do.

    Im planning to get 3 more Goteks in the future when the economy allows it and flash them aswell and fit to my private units im using and keeping.

    But what do you think of the idea ( Paypal donation ) ?

    Kind regards
    Kent Aka:Pendragon on the Mod Scene where i have contributed in many projects with both development and test/hacks ❤

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  129. Can anyone help regarding USB compatibility? I’ve tried two Gotek drives on two Amigas (stock 500 and stock 600), and so far only found *one* USB pen drive that worked – a Kingston DataTraveller Elite 3.0. Nothing else seems to work, at all, yet in the pictures above I can see card readers, external HDDs, all sorts in use. When using the Kingston it works amazingly well, but I’d really like to use other sticks as well. I’ve tried using the same formatting, the same files etc, no luck at all. Any ideas anyone?

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    • Use HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool to make format to the usb unit, i´ve tried a few and no one worked, i did a format using this tool and everything works

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    • probably what you format the usb with causing the problem
      DONT USE WINDOWS,
      this is a known problem also with the Wii console,
      you should use a 3rd party formatting software and do a full format.
      no windows fast-format.

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    • Try RMPrepUSB to change the logical configuration of the partition. An USB-HDD configuration (MBR partition table, primary active) should work. Don’t know why some pendrives come with the USB-FDD format, or even in USB-HDD with some fancy displacement of the partition headers (gives some kind of logic type error when installing grub4dos for autoboot pendrives) that RMPrepUSB repairs redoing the partition and formating.

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    • Hello,

      have a problem with the cortex floppy emulator and a hard drive in an amiga 2000
      When i disable the hard drive i can boot into the cortex floppy emulator menu without problems
      when i enable the hard drive it comes up a error message sys: selector unknown command
      how can i fix it, that the emulator also boots when the hdd is enabled

      best regards

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  131. We can begin to report to ebay about these fradulent sales. They contains a copyrighted material. If all of us do it, these sales will be cancelled soon.

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  133. Glad to hear that you plan to bring out also the CPC and Atari ST version.
    (I already bought a CPC Scart cable and a ROM Box for it … never owned a CPC before, also bought an Atari ST FM there I can use DOS disks as an inconvenient workaround … 😉

    Regarding the problem at hand, I guess it is not trivial.
    IF there is a serial number readable from the embedded controller on the Gotek then it could be as easy as setting up a download generator which makes builds that work for only this box.
    Using the selector on the host will be circumvented really rapdily I guess (and would make life harder for the normal user, and easier for the user of a hacked selector).

    If there is no SW readable serial, then maybe it would be best to simply sell preflashed Goteks and set the firmware protection bit that is also set on the original Gotek FW (I guess not a prefect protection, but better than nothing).
    Then you could run into tax problems, and need to source the Goteks yourself.
    (Question here … how to do upgrades? Maybe just flash part of the flash ROM and check for a secret in the part that was not overwritten and was not distributed as a file?!?)

    Whichever way you decide to go, I hope that there will be a good way ahead, and that you do not abandon this project!
    If you set up a paypal donate just give us a note.
    If you start selling preflashed Goteks sign me up for a CPC6128 and an Atari ST version.

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  135. Recently heard of this and I might consider buying it to bring my old A500 back to life. I’m just thinking about one thing. While there are some multi disk games that prompt you for a new disk with a message like « Insert disk # and press fire to continue » there are even games that use the standard floppy drive’s insert disk sensor, you know – « ticking » floppy drive waits for you to insert the new disk and starts reading right away. Since in the case of this emulator one needs to press button multiple times to actually get to the right disk by moving through positions where ADFs are applied, lets say you have disk 1 inserted and are prompted for disk 4 – you would need to move position to 004 from 001 = press the emulator button 3x) would this cause any potential problem with the type of games above – so that the emulator starts reading the next position (next disk) as soon as button is pressed during the disk swap procedure? Any experiences? Thanks.

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  136. Would you be interested in coding firmware that would transform the Gotek emulator to be usable with vintage synthesizers. Such as EMU EMAX, Ensoniq EPS16 etc?

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  137. Thanks for this great feature!!

    It works great in my 600 and 1200 (external)

    Only i want to have it working internal as DF0
    Only when i boot selector.adf and start selecting the first ADF file then suddenly it starts to scroll automatically up. i cannot interrupt this, and when i oot for the second time it start scrolling up immediately.

    Any idea what this can be? Normal floppydrive works without problems.

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  139. Successfully got this working in my A4000, Had problems at first because of some long file names on my ADFs, they seem to corrupt easy and caused it to lock up, but got that figured out. Also I set it up and run it as DF1. How I set it up to work on DF1 on the 4000, first I set the jumper to DS1 on the Gotek, Connected the last connector on my floppy ribbon cable. Then to run the Selector software, I held down both mouse buttons brought up the drive menu, selected disable DF0, and then Boot from DF1. Then the Selector initialized on DF1 instead of DF0 and it set up with no problems. I read where some people had some issues with this, so figured I would share.

    Thank you for doing such a nice job and your time working on this project. It is much appreciated.

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  140. I can confirm that a 5V USB->TTL serial adapter works fine. I had no success at 115200 baud though, but 57600 worked perfectly. My GOTEK device looks the same as yours but has different markings on the PCB, « SFRBA16 ».

    Btw if you still intend to make an Atari ST version I can probably help you with the ST software.

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  141. H. M. great work, really

    I’m sorry the situation that has formed around this issue, unfortunately always ends up happening either « raspberrys with MAME preconfigured », « DVDs with free software », « hard drives with 4,000 games installed » etc sold without permission or gain for the original authors.

    I hope you find some way to mark or sign with any serial number each firmware and control the software. If the Cortex M3 had some kind of hardcoded serial number, you could use a « selector + key » system against that serial. All units will be able to be obtained from anywhere, but each will have to need a custom selector, by you…

    If there is no hardcoded, you could generate firmware with serial numbers at certain offset of the firm, and selector.adf with your key and registration name encrypted with the unit serial, at the style of WHDLoad, which is displayed in the program selector the name / nick registered user. That would curb a little abuse of mass distribution.

    On the other hand, I hope your work in the CPC (and the Atari, but I’m not user) reaches the public and we enjoy your effort.

    In the meantime I’ll have to continue with the original firmware Gotek 720kb and .DSK to .IMG converter, limited to use single files on images with IBM CPC format (As seen in the video I posted here a while ago)

    The good thing about having tried the original firmware is that we have discovered some tricks in the CPCs file system, like getting the original AMSDOS to 250kb overloading the file table, recording 3.5 « disks to USB drives (limited to IBM CPC format ), etc 😉

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  145. Just did it. It worked flawlessly. One suggestion to people. Check the floppy cable , it must be inserted in the right direction or it won’t work. Also don’t forget to put the jumper on DS0. Out of 3 USB thumbdrives that I tried, only one worked. Thanks for your efforts and for this howto!

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  146. @H.M.
    Thank you very much for the firmware you have done for Gotek Drive, I
    Forget the people who takes advantage of the work without permission, unfortunately there are people like that everywhere.
    If you release source code thanks and if you decide not to release it, thanks anyway.
    Greetings.

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  147. @ H.M.
    Congratulations on your achievement of creating a working floppy drive emulator for the Amiga.
    This initiative is much appreciated among the Amiga community.
    Good luck with future updates and/or projects.

    Best Regards,

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  148. Okay works on my A2000 (8MB, KS2).. so at least I know the Gotek isn’t at fault and the memory key is fine (at least for this Amiga).. wish I could have this working on my A500 and A1000.. they’re the poor Amigas crying for an upgrade.

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    • o.k. i think i have a possible fix.
      some changes have been made on the a500 between r3 and r6.
      find a resistor called R305 and make sure it’s 1k and not some lower value.
      then find resistor-array RP501 and make sure it’s 10k and not 4k7

      let us know if that fixes the problem. 🙂

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    • to all: Be also aware to connect the floppy power connector in the right way around on the amiga mainboard. it’s not the same in A600 compared to A500 (it’s swapped). if you connect the gotek with the 12V pin only once by mistake, it will destroy some logic IC on the gotek resulting in « gotek fe init error » every time. so before connecting, make sure you found the correct 5V pin on the amiga.

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  149. Herve, you may remember my comment, several months ago. I think i was the first one to offer you a donation to give you incentive to continue the development, and also to express my gratitude for your work.
    I still think you should receive some kind of payment for your work, as you really deserve it.
    For everyone that says the people selling it are « helping » people that don’t know how to do, i totally agree with Herve. You should go away with your lame excuses! I’m positive that a lot of these people that can’t do live near someone who can, and would do this at no costs, or maybe at the postage costs.
    Back on the money subject, Herve, i really recommend you that you do some research on receiving money, paying taxes to your government, or accepting gifts from a wishlist, as someone else suggested before.
    Maybe you could start a kickstart project? If a fair amount of money (that you decide) is reached, you provide the source code for the firmwares. And you can do a kickstart project for each version, for each computer, or you can do only one for all of them. I don’t know. These details you’ll have to elaborate. But you have to find a way to get the money you deserve so much!!
    I have the Lotarek emulator. I also have Atari STs and an Amstrad CPC, as well as lots of Amigas. They all work with the commercial solution available today, but i barely use the CPC or Atari ST, because i hate to use diskettes. Your solution is perfect, because it’s simple, and affordable. I can have one for each computer, instead of having to share the Lotarek emulator among them, everytime i want to use them.
    I will pay you money for continued development (at least until we have CPC and Atari ST, and maybe others, versions that are as good as the last Amiga version) of the firmware, as soon as you figure a way to receive it!!
    Thank you very much once again for the work you’ve done so far!

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  150. Placing it in an external enclosure and booting from that still gives the « Emulator Not Found! » message – sadly I don’t have a memory expansion for the A500 so can’t see if that’s part of the issue.

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    • I tested mine with both AR2 and AR3 on an A500 with no mem expansion.. I have no problems getting into the selector screen other than when saving it’ll make garbled file listing, so I need to add a new selector disk. this is tested with Kick1.3 on an A500 (can’t say which revision motherboard sorry) Doing the same with mem expansion makes no difference.

      Are you sure you’re running the latest firmware and latest selector?

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      • Hi, yes I am. Thanks for the info regarding the A500 memory – either I have a faulty Gotek (but it does boot up to the credits.. not sure if it would get that far if it was faulty).. or the 5 different USB keys and SD card to USB adapter and/or the 3 different SD cards I’ve tried aren’t completely compatible.

        I think the next step is to try it in my A2000.. I’m more of an A1000 and early A500 user though.

    • I’ve had that problem as well, I did all sorts of things and then it worked again, poor cables (reinsert a few times), re-download and reflash (in case something was wrong), glitching button on external housing etc etc.
      Someone wrote earlier they had problems with Action Replay, try redoing everything from the beginning and see if there’s still problems. There’s a lot that can go wrong that has nothing to do with the firmware.
      Some USB-memory just won’t work, try all you have, I use a pair of really cheap microSD USB readers, works fine. I had one or two USB memory sticks that wouldn’t work but most of my units have.

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      • I’ve seen a fair amount of people saying they can’t flash the firmware, or have strange behaviour during use. So i want to share my experience:
        Most of us are using cheap programmers, based on the prolific chipset. Most of these devices have « fake » chips, and i believe this is the problem.
        In my case, i could only flash the firmware reliably if i set the COM port speed at 14kbps or less. As the firmware is small, this don’t take too much time, and i never had problems with the emulator on any of my Amigas.

      • Sadly I have tried all those things with the same result.. I will try it in an A2000 later and see if there is any difference.

      • Yes, I forgot about that detail, trashed adf-files and trashed selector.adf has happened to me along with the other problems a lot of times. Now I have a « copy of selector.adf » on the USB memory so I can quickly reset if it crashes.

    • i read that there are problems on v3 motherboard.
      i cant find any schematics,
      but i suspect it’s something small like missing or added resistors on the floppy signals.
      if you have time, get the schematics to the v6 or higher board and compare it to your amiga.

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      • I have a rev 3 board and the emulator is working, but the first time, just after a power on, it throws me an error that says « — Cortex FE Init Error ! — »
        I have to do a soft reset and then it works flawlessy.
        But as I said, not before a soft reset, is not really annoying, but…
        The problem is on the amiga, the same emulator works without problems in my A600 and A1200.

  151. Swapped out a Kickstart 1.2 (which makes me sad) for a new-fangled 1.3 (yuck!) and still have the same issue – starfield, credits and « Emulator Not Found! ». As with Kickstart 1.2 when I try and perform any disk-ops with Action Replay 2 it just locks up the AR2.

    If it truly is a firmware issue I hope the author can find and spend some of his precious time making this solution work with KS 1.2 and 512Kb.

    As for the issue of people selling these drives on eBay – they should do the decent thing and send the author some royalties.

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  152. I’ve tested the gotek in an external drive enclosure. It works perfectly on an A1200, but the A500 causes problems. The list in the selector disk is messed up with weird signs for names. I’ve tried using Kick 3.1, 2.04 and 1.3
    When using Kick 1.3 I’ve used Action Replay to boot to DF1

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  153. Herve,

    I’ve gotten this floppy emulator to work with old Dec PDP-11’s. Do you think it would be possible to write a menu system for them? Would you consider releasing any of the source code for others to modify for other platforms?

    Thanks,
    Crawford

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  154. Many people would never use Gotek drives with your firmware in their Amigas because they simply have no idea how to inject your firmware in Gotek drives, even when they got step by step instructions. If Ltac did not sell them on amibay, I would have bought different emulator from Lotharek. I understand you are p***ed off about sellers who sell Goteks for ridiculous money but Ltac’s profit is just few Euros for all the work (ordering emulators, flashing emulators, packacking etc) and plenty of Amiga users are happy thank to him and of course, thank to you. How much Euros go into his pocket when he sells one Gotek unit for 31 Euros *including* shipping costs? You yourself state that regular Gotek emulator unit costs 27$! He did a great service for retro computing enthusiastics just for few euros, it’s like paying a friend couple of beers for his help.
    When Ltac does not offer them on amibay anymore, people will buy them from some parasite who make *real* profit out of your work and you are fool if you think you can stop them.
    And no, I am not Ltac or his friend.

    Réponse

    • LTAC charges the same as most ppl selling this item on eBay that is around $42, the price of a GOTEK drive with free shipping costs around $29 and has done so for a very long time. The lowest price I’ve seen is down to $19 with free shipping. Thats a huge income. But respectfully LTAC has changed his sales post to reflect that the drives will not be shipped with the firmware unless Hervé has accepted that sale to that individual.

      When there is open source, there are always some people who’ll try and exploit that. here’s a good example:
      http://www.ebay.com/itm/UFO-AI-Enemy-Unknown-Xcom-Type-Game-Software-Computer-Program-/121174032997?pt=AU_PC_Video_Games_Games&hash=item1c36890265

      this game can be downloaded from
      http://ufoai.org/wiki/News

      Sorry that was a little off-topic.

      @Hervé I think I mentioned this earlier, but the comments list is huge ;-P have you considdered making an amazon.fr wishlist of stuff? then people can buy you books, music etc as gifts. Is that legal there?

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    • he is making profit from this. 1$ or 100$ of profit per device is the same : He take other people work to sell it without asking any permission, and without mentioning where he take the firmware.
      And even more: this seller insult me and threaten me when i try ask some explanations.
      To you and to all these sellers : take your wares and excuses and go away. This is not a commercial project and i didn’t give the authorization to sell it. Your behaviour will just kill this project and probably many others free projects.
      i don’t need you and people don’t too either. i already know that there are tons of commercials projects, this is just not the purpose of this one.

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    • I have few questions for you. Why do you « bother » with retro computing if you’re not going to learn some basic computer stuff? Why do you want to have some, let’s say, advanced stuff on your retro computers if you’re not willing to learn at least something about it? And using serial connection is rather basic :/

      P.S.

      So far I’ve bought three goteks, two are in my A500s and one was supposed to go to Atari 1040STFM. I paid around $20 for each, that’s around 15€. From where I live shipping (with tracking) to whole Europe would be around 6€. Bubble envelope is around 1€ if you buy it in post office, or 20 cents if you buy 10 packs in store, possibly even cheaper as I didn’t exactly research the thing. Soft packing he got for free with his gotek, chinese seller shipped it that way. So, he probably earns 9-10 euros per piece. Not bad considering his biggest part of the effort is taking the package to post office and sending it…

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  155. Thanks for such wonderful effort. I am not a very good programmer but want to replace a very old format . Can i download the code and give sectors and track info to read my floppy.

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  156. Those users having trouble trying to flash a Gotek USB drive with the Cortex firmware replacement using a (Prolific) PL2303HX USB to RS232 TTL should lower Baud, not use Windows 8.1 and probably most importantly use a USB 2.0 port (not a hub or USB 3.0 – which seemed to be my problem). Also take time to check the circuit board – found a fair amount of solder bridges on tracks.

    Many thanks to the author of the new firmware – we need Amiga 1000 support! 🙂

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    • On bootup – I get the starfield and tex display – but no firmware version is displayed and at the bottom of the screen it says « Emulator Not Found! » – this is on a US NTSC A500 Kickstart 1.2 with only 512kb RAM.. anyone have any suggestions?

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      • Yes, Jumper is on S0, SELECTOR.ADF on USB key and other ADFs are on the key also – with no limited access permissions.. suggestions welcome 😦

      • I have a suggestion, try another machine. Then hope and pray that Hervé wants to any more updates and try and fix it.
        How about swapping Kickstart and see if it helps, then add 512kB, perhaps it’s not working under KS1.2…?
        Has anyone else used an old unexpanded NTSC A500 like this with this firmware?

  157. Hi herve,
    I think you need a registration like whdload.
    You did a good job and you should get your part of the selling.
    It is difficult to find a way against hackers and profiteers.

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    • > and you should get your part of the selling.

      If I understand Herve right, he doesn´t want anything for his work. And when it get to « selling » he too doesn´t want this because then he have to pay taxes etc.!

      What can be most helpful with this is to right to those sellers and point out that they are killing future updates of this project with their offers.

      Luzie

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  158. You should sell these yourself, if the code can be protected – do so with the new firmware and only sell programmed drives or have a programming service. Maybe a selection of trusted beta testers as well to try out new things.
    I think a lot of us would have loved to show our appreciation with money and many of us would have loved not having troubles programming, if someone that has good equipment does it all would have been a lot easier.
    So improve on software, sell new one only programmed into chips, then these opportunists can try selling the old version with it’s known bugs and less good selector program (as you’d improve on that as well).
    You could have a few poeple doing this for you, if you don’t want the work load yourself.

    Réponse

      • Is there any way to partially flash the firmware?
        I’ve been thinking about this lately.
        This way, you may be able to sell them pre-flashed and then release partial updates of the firmware, not the full thing, only the changes to be flashed by the users.
        No one besides you would have the full firmware needed to flash the drive the first time, only partial updates, that would be useless if you don’t have the fully flashed unit that, of course, they can only buy from you.

        To avoid leaving behind people who already have flashed their unit with current firmwares, a « full flashing » service should be offered too.
        This way, we can send the drive to you to flash the new full version of the firmware and then, we can flash the updates by ourselves.

        As I said before, you should think about selling them directly, with new and improved versions of the firmware, somehow incompatible with the current ones, made to support the partial updates that would be incompatible with old versions of the firmware.

      • Thinking further.
        You can have a part of the firmware that always stays the same, that would NEVER be given with the partial updates.
        This part can be anything, even some data that does nothing, or only acts as a « keyfile », but needed to make it work, making the firmware check if this part is present, maybe checking if there is a certain string written in a certain point of the flash memory.

        This way, no matter how many updates you release, no one could be able to take bits from these updates to assemble a full firmware.

      • Hi Herve

        I hope that you will make a CPC and Atari ST version.
        Could you maybe give an insight what the outcome of your thinking was?

        I really hope that you will not give up this project!

  159. Hi Hervé, I see you can’t release the ST version because of people who makes easy money. That’s a pain for you and everyone here at least. I hope there’s a solution but I don’t see one by myself.
    It would takes more than a simple hobby to control the project and it would also be not good for it’s future. (stay a great device with open and free spirit, hundred of tools from Gotek fans)
    Sad!

    Now there are more and more sellers, but I don’t think they sell 30 Gotek’s per day.

    I’m pretty sure that many failed to flash the Gotek. Maybe it’s there things could change.

    Perhaps a website for true n00b that explain how to flash the Gotek with photos and youtube video, something really really crystal clear and avoid every technical words. And also where to buy for cheap the stuff with links that always refresh and with a 100% garanty to work (especially the USB adapter !). Explain how it’s simpler to buy some dupont cables, pins etc. It should reduce tha lalala-bay traffic. Well it really need to be wrote by someone who isn’t technical at all.

    It became something easy to do only when it works, the Gotek can be a true bitch to flash otherwise. When the software (flasher) just freeze… It’s really @X!!!fuuuuu

    For exemple I found myself that if I didn’t connect the 3,3V power pin from the USB flasher to Gotek (a n00b will understand) on that required « bridge » (where to buy a jumper, again!) that connect Boot0 and 3,3V pins together (clearness :p) it won’t work at all.

    From every photos or videos and forums I never see that. (I bought 3 differents adapters until I managed to make it work, I was stressy then :P)

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    • >Hi Hervé, I see you can’t release the ST version because of people who makes easy money. That’s a pain for you and everyone here at least. I
      >hope there’s a solution but I don’t see one by myself.
      >It would takes more than a simple hobby to control the project and it would also be not good for it’s future. (stay a great device with open and
      >free spirit, hundred of tools from Gotek fans)

      There is a solution -> Redirect all this money to my pocket ;). Serioulsy since some people are ready to pay 70 euros for this, i can sell it myself 😉

      >Now there are more and more sellers, but I don’t think they sell 30 Gotek’s per day.
      I count about 500 euros of gain per seller, and probably even more.

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      • An idea to avoid these sellers:
        You could keep your work putting a counter on the firmware and when you reach that counter (10 times on/off gotek?) stop working.
        At practical effects this would not make sense to be sold.
        Meanwhile the followers of this project could try and report errors, enjoy and have fun. In the future you could decide if release a version without restrictions.

      • A built in counter would prevent people that doesn’t understand it and can edit and recompile the code again from selling new versions. Intentional bugs could be added perhaps… It won’t prevent people from selling what’s already out there though, that ship has sailed. Offering something better at a lower price perhaps might be an idea, iron out all bugs, add new features – maybe ask people here for ideas how they would like to use it. I’m thinking work on selector and prevent files from being crashed (maybe automatically make a copy instead and work with the copy – if it’s trashed the original is still unharmed on the card). I think that’s the only real problem I’ve had, selector.adf getting trashed and have to recopy – I now keep a copy of selector.adf on the card just to be able to restore it easier.

      • The only way out would be that you *DO* sell these yourself.

        With your LATEST firmware flashed on them, not 1.05a.
        That reads, do _no_ longer put the latest firmware version for download, just have it integrated into the device.
        And firmware updates must be applied online henceforth, just like a Fritz Box.

        Those 0.1 percent of brainiacs who could digitally « pry » your latest firmware off the flash ROM to a binary file may be disregarded.
        How many people can successfully mod an XBox 360?
        See….

  160. Is anyone using the cortex with an A500 rev 3?
    I have som trouble with writing to disks with that combination.
    I have no problem writing when a real diskdrive i connected to the internal floppy connector but the cortex fails most of the time. The behavior is just like it doesn’t get the Write Enable signal so it behaves just like it’s writing but nothing happends. When using the selector software it often writes nothing when saving or the filenames get scrambled.

    This video about A1200 describes how it behaves pretty good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uoi9VXIlGF0 but i must have that write enable signal since real floppy drives works.

    The cortex is working good in two other amigas and one very strange thing is that writing on the cortex seems to work 100% if i have an real external floppydrive connected at the same time as the cortex.

    http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com has one thing to say about the rev 3 motherboards. « Very buggy, avoid if possible » and i can avoid using it but it would be fun if i could get it to work with the cortex without having the external drive connected. 🙂

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    • Many people are doing shit with the firmware (-selling it on ebay,amibay and other commercial places) and don’t get any respect at all for the work done here… I even got some insults from the one selling it on amibay… You should contact him directly for the future update since he seems to believe to own all the rights over the firmware…
      i think that you understand that i am not very motivated to work for these peoples.
      This is not the end of the project, but I have to found another way for it to avoid such abuse.

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      • Maybe a form of registration for the firmware files?
        Or maybe contacting the manufacturer and making an offer to work with them as there seems to be a huge demand for this disk drive along with your firmware.
        This way, you can avoid these disrespecteful bunch if people can buy the drive already flashed from the manufacturer.

        I have flashed units for my friends, but always for free, I don’t think I have the right to sell something that isn’t my work as others do and, in fact, I’m happy to « steal » some units that would be sold by them charging for a job that costs no more than 2€ for the programmer and 2 minutes of my time, I saw the thread on amibay and what he said about asking you for permission and it, in fact, did sound… well… not really good.

        Also, I don’t think anyone have the right to ask for more than all you have already done, it was a hobby project, you decide when to pause, when to resume your work and when to completely stop it, so… It all depends on you and your desire to keep giving your time to the community, I did it in the past, for the gamepark gp2x community and I can say it can become stressful.

        I am really grateful, and not only me, a lot of people are, and they respect you and your work, I’m sure they will understand any decission you make about this.
        You can even release the source code if you feel like it and let other people continue your work, make forks, alternative firmwares, alternative selectors…
        You can do whatever you want, it’s yours, your work, your decission.
        But I can say that what you have already done, is more than enough, think about it, take your time and do whatever you feel you have to do.

        But whatever it is, I can only say THANKS, from the bottom of my heart, from a neighbour from Spain that love what you did here.

      • You are absolutely right about who sells your « firmware ».

        I have also had problems in the past about these things, not completely resolved.

        I advise you to put a warning in 4 different languages ​​(English / German / French / Italian) with a RED background on bootup of your LOADER on Amiga and other computers (CPC/Atari).

        Obviously trying to find an easy way because this cannot be changed.

        Respect.

      • Herve your work is VERY much appreciated!!
        I already bought an Atari 1040 STFM.
        And 2 days ago I bought a CPC 6128 (not yet here)
        I hope that you do not loose your enthusiasm.
        You have our full support!

      • I suspected that was the reason why there hasn’t been any updates. And I completely understand, I’ve even saw them on ebay for 70+ euro. It would piss me off too. One gotek drive on ebay goes for 20-25$, I would understand if someone adds 5$ to that price and sell them preflashed. But what some people are doing is beyond words.

        As I mentioned before one option could be to add warning text to selector to say if you paid more than 30$ for it you’ve been ripped off as it’s free. But I guess that would just make this kind of people to stay on older versions…

      • Hi Herve.

        I want to say thank you for this wonderful work of coding. As a retro enthusiast I love all kinds of way that these systems can be preserved. I’m sorry that some people are greedy dicks and are profiteering from your work. I am in the process of making a video on my youtube channel showing how to flash and use your firmware and selector in an effort to take people away from the ebay/amibay scammers. I hope you find a way to continue work on your other system projects, but I support your decision either way 100%!

      • @hervemessinger As much I respect your work and knowledge, I must tell you that you do not have right to get angry about this. You made great work and published it without restriction. That means you did not expect anything in return, but praise.

        However, when you found out that someone else makes money with the firmware that you programmed, that wasn’t so pleasing for you?

        There are lots of us who like « Do It Yourself – DIY » way. But others do not have skills and knowledge to do so, and want to buy preinstalled pieces. That is why they are ready to pay way more. If you wanted to earn money from this project you should (and still can) offer preinstalled version, here or on e-bay.

        I do not know if you can charge firmware for the device which was never meant to be run on legally?

        But, I have idea how you can charge for your work hours. Simply make a donation deposit box. Users who appreciate your work, and users who would like to see next firmware version will donate. When donation reaches specified amount you decide – you can publish next firmware version. Of course, nothing stops anyone to donate purely for the fact that he admires your work.

        You could also add link to your page in the firmware (as some sort of water mark). So everyone will know where it comes from.

        Those are my thoughts. I hope you will not drop down your support, for the sake of retro machine users, who simply like to use old machines. They are not guilty for actions of one or two morons.

  162. Hi, I have a strange problem (New to this kinda stuff).
    I re-programmed a gotek drive with this firmware (the program said all is ok – done).
    I plugged up the drive as s0 via external drive cable to my Amiga 500 & turned on the machine, it reads the workbench disk off the internal floppy drive and once on the desktop i get this:

    DF1:BAD
    RAM
    FloppyEmulator
    WorkBench1.3

    I cant load the selector,adf, any help?

    Thank-you in advance 🙂

    Réponse

  164. I’m having a strange problem.
    Flashed the unit without problems, put it on mi A600, booted and the selector appeared, but it’s stuck where it says — Init DF0 —.
    I’ve tried with 4 pendrives, 2Gb, 8Gb and 16Gb and two SD card readers, using fat or fat32.
    The only one who works is the 16Gb one, but it only gets there, I can’t select any file, it doesn’t show anything besides that.
    The boot disk is shown in workbench when the pendrive is inserted.
    I’ve tried disabling all other units, with same results.

    Any ideas?

    Réponse

    • Aaaaand just bought another 8Gb usb drive, this one with an activity led.
      The led keeps blinking while the selector says — Init DF0 —, so I think I’ts trying to read it but it can’t for some reason still unknown to me.

      Réponse

    • Forget about it, or maybe not.
      The floppy emulator is working just fine right now.
      The problem was a bad solder on my cia.
      The strange thing is that the original disk drive worked just fine, but the gotek refused to work where the original one did.

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  165. Is there any reason why it wouldn’t work on an Amiga 3000? When I save and reset it will just go to a black screen and freeze. Restarting will just lock the drive and the amiga will boot into workbench. It only goes back to normal when I delete and reupload the selector.adf

    Frustrating.

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  166. Hi there, is there anyway to reset the memory on the cortex drive? I loaded in a disk image and set it to disk 03 but now it won’t load and the buttons are unresponsive. I believe I loaded in an image with too many characters or something, I’m not sure

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  167. Is there any chance that Gotek will get a IBM PC compatible firmware that doesn’t suck?
    I would like something similar to Amiga firmware but for PC.

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  168. Hallo Herve!

    I bought the Gotek emulator as well. Thank you for your good work!

    I even started to develop on this hardware just for fun. Did you get the I2C interface of the display working via bit banging or using the I2C interface of the STM32 ? I tried latter, but the I2C seems to stay busy. According to the datasheet of the TM1651, the protocol is not completely compatible to I2C (i.e. no address byte should be sent). Is this, what you found out?

    Thanks for your information and best regards,
    Sven

    Réponse

    • OK, in case somebody is interested in this topic: Gotek swapped the SDA and the SCL pins of the I2C which doesn’t allow to use the STM32 internal interface. According to the schematics, even the pull-ups seem to be missing. So the only solution is two fix these two small bugs (I2C signal swapping is possible without soldering, pull-ups can be easily soldered to the small PCB of the 3-digit LED display) or do bit-banging like Gotek or Herve did it…

      Réponse

    • @manu: nice work… but is this work only building the floppy in the machines?
      …or can you load (and perhaps save) on the AtariST and the CPC?
      If you can load diskimages, please let us know, how you managed that…

      BR

      ForD68

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  171. Hello,

    I have a working Gotek flashed drive with the last firmware. Thnak you for this amazing work.

    I can clearly get and reproduce a conflict between the Gotek drive and the X-Surf 100 (or the Roadshow software).

    When I plug the Gotek drive, the X-Surf 100 cannot connect to the network. If I unplug the Gotek, the local network connection is ok.

    I don’t see the relation between an emulated floppy drive and my network card (or Roadshow, I don’t know where is this conflict exactly) and I don’t know what to do.

    Any idea ?

    Thank you.

    A2000 rev 6.2,
    Kickstart 3.1,
    2 MB chip RAM,
    TekMagic 060, 128 MB,
    Picasso IV
    X-Surf 100
    OS 3.9+Roadshow 1.11,

    Réponse

  172. Anyone tryed to create a save disk in order to use it on Sensible World Of Soccer?
    I downloaded a adf file called blank_disk.
    Entered the game, formated the disk, create a save file and saved it on the blank disk.
    After rebooting the Amiga, I try to load the game and get an error saying the disk isn’t recoginzed as a save data disk…

    Réponse

  173. Hi

    Can someone pleased advise on which windows driver version is best for the TTL adapter? I have tried a few versions and only get ‘unrecognized device – please reset your device and try again’. I have tried resetting the emulator by shorting RST and ground as advised. I have since found out there may be a driver issue with the STM software. I am using the following adapter: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00F26T9AO/ref=oh_details_o03_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

    Any help would be appreciated!

    Réponse

  175. Hi, I have just received as a gift one Floppy emulator, the board is this:

    Is this floppy compatible with the firmware? The drive has 2 digits only, but i don’t know if it is hardware based on Gotek drives. I didn’t find so much info about pinout, only this:

    Cliquer pour accéder à usb-floppy-emulator-v2-and-slimline-manual_v1.4.pdf

    Seems like this one, but motherboard is not the same, but pin headers looks like the red one.

    Can somebody help me with this?

    Thanks!

    Réponse

    • I tried as well, but he explained he’d get in trouble and need to pay tax so he didn’t want anything. 😦
      I think he could open an American PayPal account and we could send some money there.

      Réponse

    • The question has been asked before by other friendly people, and the answer from Herve was something like this: due to some government things he’d have to pay taxes from your gifts. So he’d perfer not. Though I can’t remember if it’s possible to buy as a gift on Amazon. That would be a nice alternative.

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  178. For anyone who might want this:
    I tried an adapter for using the gotek with the external floppy drive connector of an amiga 500. You can find the pinout here:
    http://www.ianstedman.co.uk/Amiga/designs/Floppy_Adaptor_V2/floppy_adaptor_v2.html
    And maybe if you don’t connect any of the sel1,sel2,sel3 signals and jumper gotek as ds0,it might be possible to have the gotek work like « internal » drive through the external drive connector!
    This way you will have gotek as df0 without needing to open you amiga at all! 😉

    Réponse

    • I don’t think the signal for df0 goes to the external port, you have to change the sel-signals on the IC. One suggestion is to move all one step so you’ll have df1 as df0, df2 turns to df1, then you’ll have your df0 externally.

      Réponse

    • You go to 000 on gotek to mount SELECTOR.ADF and run selector from workbench. It works fine. Only downside is that it doesn’t have exit function so when you finish selecting ADFs you’ll have to choose save & reboot option as usual and that will reboot amiga.

      Réponse

  180. Hi, I’m having an issue my newly flashed drive, selector starts to load gets to init DF0 then shows Cortex FE init error. Jumper is set to S0 and I have tried numerous flash drives/cards/adapters but the same response every time. Selector adf is visible under workbench when booted from HDD.

    Réponse

    • Hmmm… It sounds like you’re using a bad firmware and selector image combination.
      Please, ensure you’re using the right selector image (just the one that comes with the firmware file you’ve put into the gotek emulator).
      I’ve also noted that the firmware sometimes get confused and tends to use « erased » files even if you’ve created a new one (fat implementation bug?), so I always do a proper cleaning when I need to reformat the USB drive (just writing ones (0xFF) to the entire drive or partition).

      Réponse

  181. Hello

    I have Clean Amiga 600 with Gotek Floppy Emulator.
    Kickstart 37.300 and…
    When i try to run demo « State of the Art » i have only WHITE screen and loading forever
    Same with game « SuperFrog » after CRYSTAL demoscene, i’ve got RED screen and nothing i can do …

    gotek version 1.05a
    using Sandisc Cruze 4GB /FAT32 (same problems with FAT16)

    other games works fine…

    Réponse

  184. At first:
    Thanks man this is a revolution.
    It’s great to stop handling the old disks.

    Wishes for your project:
    Is it possible to edit the content of the selector « offline » on my USB stick and @ my pc?
    I found the ADFs listet in the SELECTOR.ADF but i don’t unterstand how to add and/or sort the content with an hex editor.
    I ask because it’s very slow to scroll hundred of adf files up and down and add them to the list.

    Really great would be if anyone can write an editor for Windows oder Linux.
    Or if all the content is stored in an readable and writeable format.

    Also it would be great if we can select files by pressing the a letter on the keyboard.
    I mean if i press w the SELECTOR.ADF goes to the first ADF with « w », if i press a it goes to the first ADF with « a » and so on.

    Regards,
    HiBit

    PS: Sorry for my bad english

    Réponse

  185. Welcome.
    During start-up pops sys:SELECTOR Program failed (error 80000003)
    I have PPC and kick3.9
    when you turn off PPC its ok.
    How to fix it?

    Réponse

  186. Is it possible to somehow create a much larger .adf file that could be used like a hard drive for storing and accessing more files on the amiga? I realize this would be quite slow, but it would be especially handy for transferring files to an amiga with a scsi hard disk rather than floppy by floppy, or Zip drive, or serial transfer.

    Réponse

  187. Hi, I’m having problems reading the entry system for your site but here goes. Firstly I hope I’m not posting this twice – 2ndly Keep up the good work 🙂 Some questions 1) Is there any free code space left on the m3 with your firmware? 2) have you considered replacing the display board with an LCD that displays the current image name selected? ( thought for future hack project ) 3) By the looks of it your firmware doesn’t need the 999 partitions created on the USB drive is that correct? 4) when you flash the firmware are you using a USB to serial converter or can a simple serial cable ( apart from the 3.3v issue ) be used? Cheers in advance.

    Réponse

    • That’s what buttons on the front are for. With selector app set adf 1 to i.e. slot 1, and adf 2 to slot 2, save and reboot, now when game asks for floppy two press the button until there’s 2 on LCD display (or whatever slot you set adf 2 to be) and gotek will switch to that ADF.

      Réponse

      • Hey guys I came here to ask the exact question as Daniel except I’m already doing this solution with no luck. I’ve tried with many multi-disk games but when I switch to the next position for disk 2 I hit the « Retry » dialogue over and over but it never detects the switch of disks. I can boot fine on any selector number it’s just the in-game disk swap that doesn’t seem to register.

      • In Goal! That does not work.
        I tryed all available TOSEC versions and when the game asks me for disk 2 I change it but nothing happens…

  190. To complete my previous post, i have read again some comments. My problem is maybe linked to issues for copying or formating disks but i m not sure. My dump of the ram seems to be corrupted after being copied to a blank disk formated with the gotek.

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