Those are GoTek floppy emulators. Just put GoTek on the search bars and you'll see plenty of discussion about those. No, they don't make the PC think the contents of the USB drive are on a floppy like that: the USB stick must be partitioned and formatted correctly through a specific software, then each partition is seen as a floppy, and you chose the active one through the buttons on the thing itself. You need to use an specific software to transfer disk images to the USB drive. Alternatively, you can replace the firmware by a third party one (from the guys that make the HxC floppy emulator - another, more advanced, floppy emulator) and use image files instead of partitions, though, but you won't directly see the files in the USB drive.

Interesting. Much more than I knew. I might grab one of the cheaper ones and try it. Thanks!

I use one of those for my msx2. It works great and is worth it's money.

alexanrs wrote:

Those are GoTek floppy emulators. Just put GoTek on the search bars and you'll see plenty of discussion about those. No, they don't make the PC think the contents of the USB drive are on a floppy like that: the USB stick must be partitioned and formatted correctly through a specific software, then each partition is seen as a floppy, and you chose the active one through the buttons on the thing itself. You need to use an specific software to transfer disk images to the USB drive. Alternatively, you can replace the firmware by a third party one (from the guys that make the HxC floppy emulator - another, more advanced, floppy emulator) and use image files instead of partitions, though, but you won't directly see the files in the USB drive.

Just for the sake of correctness, Gotek drives actually can be managed quite fine without any software. Pushing both selector buttons at the same time while powering the PC up, starts formatting the connected USB stick. After that, you can send your floppy images or files into the stick just by using regular software (like rawrite or winimage for images and basic dos copy command or any file manager for files.). It's slow, but better than using crappy software (which is knocked of from Ipcas) that came with it.

You can also download the ipcas software and use that to manage the usb thumbstick. That's what i do. Phil made a nice video on this topic.

tayyare wrote:

Just for the sake of correctness, Gotek drives actually can be managed quite fine without any software. Pushing both selector buttons at the same time while powering the PC up starts formatting the connected USB stick. After that, you can send your floppy images or files into the stick just by using regular software (like rewrite or winimage for images and basic dos copy command or any file manager for files.). It's slow, but better than using crappy software (which is knocked of from Ipcas) that came with it.

Yup, it will create 1000 images with this method. However I wasn't able to access these images when you plug that USB into your desktop. At least not as convenient as with the ipacs software. Any tips?

philscomputerlab wrote:

Yup, it will create 1000 images with this method. However I wasn't able to access these images when you plug that USB into your desktop. At least not as convenient as with the ipacs software. Any tips?

Phil, does the ipcas software crash frequently on you're computer? I use windows 7-64 bit and when i try to open one of the floppy drive images, the software crashes. I run the program as a administrator, and i also tried setting it into windows xp compatibility mode, without succes.

No, for me it doesn't. I run Windows 8.1 64 bit.

Hello,

I also have visited this forum on a regular basis and decided I should make an account. So here I am. 😀
This subject interests me a lot, since I too have bought a gotek floppy drive - and I must say, it took
me a while to get this d*mn thing working. It's a long story and if you skip this, I can't blame you.

Here it goess. First of all I managed to connect the device the wrong way,
resulting in a non-working disk-drive. But, as resourceful and patient I am, I kept fooling around with
this thing and voila, my machine accepted the drive and drive accepted USB-sticks. Happy end you would
think...
But now comes the strange part. Thanks to Philscomputerlab I knew where to find software to fill my
usb stick with images. Thanks Phil! Ipcas' software seemed to be a nice tool to manage the images on my usb-stick, so
I thankfully used the software. Added some disks to the usb-stick according to the explanation of Phil's video and
inserted the flash drive in my good old Pentium. The first disk should boot the msdos 6.22 setup, but instead in
stopped giving the error 'Non system disk' or something like that.
Thinking it could be the image, I downloaded another (bootable/setup) image from the internet, with a
non-msdos bootloader. Wrote this on the flashdrive again and booted up the Pentium. Although the error message changed,
it kept complaining about the fact the image wasn't bootable.
With a hex-editor I compared the first megabyte or so of the files and some differences showed up! 🙁 Don't
know where these differences come from. Could it be the combination of Ipcas' software and windows 10 (64-bits)? Who
knows. So, my conclusion is, ipcas software writes images to the disk, but then screws a lot of bytes.
It left me with a somewhat unusable gotek floppydrive.

The only thing I could come up with is writing my own tool. The past few days I've been programming my
own 'disk concationation tool'. With this program and an image writing tool, I got my gotek floppy drive
working. I was so freaking proud and excited when I saw 'Starting MS-DOS' appearing on the screen! 😀

If someone is interested, please let me know. Although the program is still in alpha status, it works for
the standard situation (100 disks, 1.44M disks).

Sorry to hear that you had such a difficult time 😒

All I can say is that everyone here went through something similar 🤣

You wrote your own software? That's amazing.

I'm very much interested! Would love to give it a spin.

What would be awesome is software that can work with 1000 images. The ones you create by holding down both buttons while powering on.

I haven't used it on Windows 10, still on 8.1. But I can try it out on another machine. Could you attach a "problematic" image, that wouldn't work for you? Like the one that didn't boot?

seob wrote:

You can also download the ipcas software and use that to manage the usb thumbstick. That's what i do. Phil made a nice video on this topic.

Yeah, but it only supports 100 partitions. If you want 1000 of them for some (maybe crazy) reason, no chance with Ipcas software.

philscomputerlab wrote:

tayyare wrote:

Just for the sake of correctness, Gotek drives actually can be managed quite fine without any software. Pushing both selector buttons at the same time while powering the PC up starts formatting the connected USB stick. After that, you can send your floppy images or files into the stick just by using regular software (like rewrite or winimage for images and basic dos copy command or any file manager for files.). It's slow, but better than using crappy software (which is knocked of from Ipcas) that came with it.

Yup, it will create 1000 images with this method. However I wasn't able to access these images when you plug that USB into your desktop. At least not as convenient as with the ipacs software. Any tips?

No tips there, and by "it's slow" I mean exactly that. What I was meaning is, accessing your empty "partitions" on the USB again with Gotek. But I remember some blog owner created some batch files:

https://github.com/xtcrefugee/gotek-usb-batch-files

It's not as practiacal as the Ipcas software, but how less practical? This is somthing you should decide. 😈

And I just find that there is also this (not tried yet):

http://www.ketron.it/index.php?option=com_con … mid=20&lang=eng

Hailstorm wrote:

The only thing I could come up with is writing my own tool. The past few days I've been programming my own 'disk concationation […]
Show full quote

The only thing I could come up with is writing my own tool. The past few days I've been programming my
own 'disk concationation tool'. With this program and an image writing tool, I got my gotek floppy drive
working. I was so freaking proud and excited when I saw 'Starting MS-DOS' appearing on the screen! 😀

If someone is interested, please let me know. Although the program is still in alpha status, it works for
the standard situation (100 disks, 1.44M disks).

Creator.jpg

I would be intersted to since ipcas keeps shutting down when trying to access disks on my pc.

]Let me first say that I am very happy to see that a few of you have interest in my application.
That means a lot, thanks!
To answer your question phil, I could try to upload an image of the comparison I made. That should make thinks
very clear, I think.

This is may the most interesting one. IO.SYS gets overwritten, with the problematic effect that the bootsector
doesnt recognize the disk as bootable:
[attachment=0]diff2.JPG[/attachment
EDIT: It seems the data is shifted. Anyhow, it didn't work... 🙁

For the one who wants to use my software, please be aware the software hasn't been fully tested yet. Although I
would find it very sad if it didnt work out for you, I still can't guarantee it for everybody to work.

I have to make a few adjustments: I already got my first RFC 😉
I can have the first version uploaded within the first few hours.

Do not stress / feel rushed

Retro people are patient and we wait for the good stuff 😀

philscomputerlab wrote:

Do not stress / feel rushed

Retro people are patient and we wait for the good stuff 😀

This!.. 😈

Ok guys, here it is. I hope this tool helps you gotek users as much as it did help me.
Phil, about creating 1000 images, my software supports that now. I am not sure though
if the format is correct (all empty slots will be filled with zeros).
Could you check that for me? I can't get the gotek drive to format my usb-stick... :s

By the way, the program is quite simple in use and its self-explanatory. If someone needs help
however, please let me know. I also like to know if someone finds a bug or a weird error message,
since this program has still an alpha status.

Trying the software just now. But is it also possible to read a usb drive that is already formatted and has some images on it? Now i can only make a new project and it doesn't read the images on my usb thumbstick.
Also a little recommendation, the first image number should be IMG_000, the gotek counts from 00 to 99 when you have a 2 digit version. So images are offset by one.
Also i cannot see any of my msx disk images. They use the extention .dsk. Whould be helpfull to add a option so one can select any file with any extention instead of img and virtual floppy files.
When i add a file in the first slot and i select clear the filename and location is whiped, but the img size field isn't cleared.
The software also doesn't give a error when i make a 720k project and i load in a 1.44mb file.
Guess i'm not to smart to get how the software works, but what does the thunderbolt button do? It says it created a images but i don't now for sure.