First post, by wkjagt
- Rank
- Newbie
Hey all, first post, so thanks for having me! Obviously I've been reading this site for a while, but now I have a question that I can't find an answer for, so I am here to ask for your help.
I recently, after looking on Marketplace for a while, bought a bunch of old computers, mostly 286/386/486, but also some 8-bit computers, and a some slightly more recent things (no later than 2000 though). Also some boxes full of parts. I've so far built up two computers that work well: a 486 DX2, and a 286. My main interest with these is to do some programming like in the old days. I am using the 486 with Borland C++, and I also want to do assembly. I've done quite a bit of 6502 assembly on a homebrew computer, but x86 is a whole next level.
I bought a gotek floppy emulator that I want to use with these computers. I've been using actual floppies so far (there were a couple of boxes of those with the stuff I bought), but so far they've been very unreliable. The Gotek is giving me some problems though. I first tested with floppy images I downloaded from windowldpc.com, hoping they are the right format (edit: I made sure they were the 1.44M images). I copied these to a USB drive (formatted as FAT16), and renamed the files to 000.img, 001.img etc. First try in the Gotek (on the 486) nothing worked, I was getting "Generar failure" errors when reading the drive. The green light on the Gotek did light up though so _something_ is happening.
I then noticed that my Macbook, when copying the img files onto the USB drive, also created a bunch of hidden folders. So I thought maybe the Gotek was trying to read files in those folders, and failing because they're not image files. I couldn't remove those though because the Mac creates them automatically. I then fired up a somewhat newer computer from the batch I bought (with an AMD Duron) which has USB ports, and Windows 98 SE installed. I also installed the nusb driver so I can read the USB drive on there, and remove those hidden files. A very roundabout way of removing some hidden folders, but the only possible one I could think of with what I have. Once that was done, I connected the Gotek to this Duron machine, and see if it would work, but same problem again.
I then tried something else: I tried formatting the a: drive, and that worked! No idea why though. I could even copy files to it after that. I did a sys a: to make a bootable "disk", and rebooted the computer, and even that worked. So that gives me hope because the Gotek seemed to work. But when I plugged the USB drive back into the Mac, I didn't see anything changed. When I clicked on those .img files (and the Mac mounted them), they all contained their original files (install disks for Norton Commander). I couldn't see any trace of the Gotek writing to it, but I know that it did because I've seen it work on the W98 PC.
So yeah, I am not really sure where to take it from here. Could be that the disk images on windworldpc.com aren't the type of images that work with the Gotek? It's kind of hard to find better software to use with the Gotek on Mac too. And flashing the Gotek with Flashfloppy is going to be hard too with the Mac since everything seems to be for Windows. I am hoping for some pointers on what to try next.
Stay at home dad playing around with 286-486. Programming C and assembly. Repairing old stuff.