USB GOTEK floppy emulator FlashFloppy BLACK + 16GB. If you flash the firmware and add an i2c LCD display you get very close to the. But the creator of the HxC has ported his firmware to the Gotek hardware, and you can buy the firmware upgrade for 10. This is a cheap Chinese device that will emulate a PC style floppy using a USB memory stick. And then I read about the Gotek floppy emulator.I don’t mind experimenting with it as it was cheap. &163 24.99I have decided to replace the HxC I installed five years ago with a Gotek.The Gotek has the F105 on it. Brand New HDD Hard Drive Cable Board Connector For HP 15-DA 15-DB Series LS-G072PSuitable for HP mac.He is more into licensing his code.If you want to install a Gotek in your EII, go to this post and see how I did all the cabling and mounted a 5.25” adapter. I’ve got kind of odd ball stuff in mind. A fellow in France has written emulators to run on it for most clasic computer, like TRS80 and Atari 800s.
Gotek Floppy Emulator Upgrade For 10HxC confusionYes, the HxC was originally just a hardware floppy emulator running the HxC firmware (doh). The Gotek is also easy to mod with an OLED display and potentiometer! It’s available on eBay or in stores that sell stuff for vintage computers. By flashing it with a custom firmware like FlashFloppy or HxC, it can support other formats. More on that later… The two floppy emulators side by side About the GotekA stock Gotek only emulates a PC floppy. After the swap was done, I realized the Gotek was a great replacement and actually suited me and the EII better. Twiggy Mac auction, historic Jobs home, and browser-based Mac emulator.I decided to replace the HxC Floppy Emulator with a Gotek Floppy Emulator running FlashFloppy! The primary reason was that I needed the HxC’s more advanced jumper settings in another project. I added the optional OLED display and potentiometer options. It has the OLED and potentiometer mods.I bought mine from Amiga Kit in the UK, but there are other vendors. My Gotek Here’s how the Gotek looks like when I got it from Amiga Kit. So the HxC software nowadays works on non HxC hardware as well. This gives access to the screws on the bottom.The Gotek id jumper was already set to S0.When I researched EII + Gotek + FlashFloppy, I was worried that it wouldn’t work when I found this issue. A tip for opening up the EII, is to place it on two boxes like I did. InstallationIt’s as simple as installing an HxC. As soon as the Gotek has the FlashFloppy firmware, it can be updated with USB. I recommend buying a pre-flashed Gotek unless you really want to flash it via serial yourself. ![]() DS_Store and Thumbs.db from the computer, are not displayed!Combining the OLED with the potentiometer makes navigation quick. Also, unsupported files and system files, like. It’s also a lot easier to see what’s a file and what’s a directory. The Gotek has none of the annoyances I had with HxC – the bad screen, the awkward navigation and the 90’s style Java configuration software.The OLED screen is fantastic – clear and redraws quickly! Smaller than the HxC, but that’s not a problem to me. The SanDisk Ultra Fit fits ultra well.To me, we have a clear winner, and that’s the Gotek. The knob on the rotary should maybe be changed to something more in style of the EII. FlashFloppy seems to work just as well for the EII, and it’s free!Here’s a summary of the pros of each floppy emulator. HxC’s config file is binary and must be edited with the HxC software.Another thing – HxC is really mature by now, but it also costs money. One could have objections to the fact that the pen drive sticks out a bit, but there are very compact models available, if sticking out is a problem.The FlashFloppy configuration is file based, just edit the FF.CFG file in your favorite editor (mine is VS Code). To solve this you basically have three alternatives: I don’t have a computer with a 5.25″ drive, so I have no way of transferring all the EII images I’ve got (could be solved if I get my Mac SE 30 and the serial thing working)As the EII uses 5.25″ floppy drives, the connectors aren’t the same as for 3.5” drives. an SD card can hold a lot of floppy images One of the floppy drives doesn’t work and replacement drives are expensive These are some of the reasons: Alternative 2 shows the extension/adapter cable route. In the picture below, taken from the manual, alternative 1 is the route I took. It’s also worth noticing that the cable is very long, almost a meter, which makes it nearly impossible to find a standard floppy cable and just add an extra 5.25″ male connector. I skipped the extension/adapter route since it would require a female 5.25″ connector, and I could as well create a whole new cable since I was messing with cables anyway. Since I don’t like messing with the original one I chose to create one from scratch. Install microsoft word for mac freeLotharek REV F HxC drive (REV F is the 3.5″ floppy version). One 5.25″ floppy female connector “ 34-way card edge connector IDC” Two standard 3.5″ floppy female connectors Screenshot from the E M X P manual (a must for everyone doing this conversion) Parts Underneath the key there’s a rubber mat which the key pushes on. You simply push the key downwards at the front, and then pull it backwards towards you.I removed both the E2 key and its neighboring F2 key to get a better view. I suspected this was due to oxidation and opened up the EII.Removal of a key is simple, but you have to be careful not to break the now 30 year old fragile plastic. 4 pin Molex to floppy power adapter, like this (I had one lying around, probably included with a PSU)Oddly enough, the E2-key on my EII didn’t trigger as it should, it was triggering very randomly. 5.25″ to 3.5″ adapter bracket, like this (I already had one from a computer chassis) I should cost around €100, but I’ve seen “unofficial resellers” on eBay selling them for €150-200 – that’s a scam. These can be replaced, but I’ve understood that it’s quite a lot of work, and it’ll definitively die on you again.The transformer transforms 5V to a much higher that supplies the backlight with power. These kind of transformers often emit a high pitched frequency which can be quite annoying. There are basically two things that can go wrong: The backlight itself or its transformer.The backlight The original EII display don’t use leds for the backlight as modern displays do, but another kind of lamp. I was tempted to remove all keys and clean them, but I thought it’s an unnecessary risk due to the keys being fragile.One thing that sooner of later will die on your EII, if hasn’t already, is the backlight of the lcd display. After that I put the keys back to test if the problem was solved, which it was!When the keys were loose, I cleaned them from 30 years of dirt. I sprayed a cotton swab with electronics cleaner and cleaned the surface from oxidation. PartsEII OEM displays can be bought on eBay for a lot of money, and they will die sooner or later. On my EII I suspect someone has been doing some kind of operation on the display before, since the display wasn’t physically connected to the display. The transformer used on the EII is the NEC NEL-D32-46.The solution is to replace the whole lcd display with a newer one that has led-backlight and remove the transformer.
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