OK, but which external drive should be used? It turns out that there is one that is PERFECT for this kind of operation. Plus, any external floppy drive will have a nice case and cable ready to plug into the back of any Amiga. Solution: Use an external floppy drive as a donor device, remove its drive mechanism and re-use its case, disk interface circuitry and power cable for the GoTek. GoTek’s were designed to be internal drives that use the computer’s floppy drive power and ribbon cable. You can’t just sit one of those on the table and plug a cable right into it. Think of the GoTek literally as an internal disk drive. The “problem” with Gotek devices if you want to make them external is that they don’t come with floppy drive interface circuitry. No way no how, missy! This allows my original hardware to stay as-is but will also allow for nearly seamless testing of new ADF files as they drop. I decided that I would at least entertain the idea of a GoTek as an external floppy drive - just not replace the internal DF0. Plus, I enjoy making disk labels.īut now that I’ve been a beta tester of new Amiga games for Doublesided Games, moving ADF files to original floppies for each dot-release during development was a major drag and made me want to procrastinate testing. Moving an ADF from the internet to an actual physical floppy might only take 5 minutes, too. So I never really saw a pressing need to “fix” something that wasn’t broken. Now get off my lawn!įor me, all of my original floppy drives work perfectly and 99.9% of my disks do, too.
GOTEK USB FLOPPY EMULATOR SOFTWARE DOWNLOAD PLUS
Plus you can just download ADFs off the internet to your USB stick and plug it in. So for a lot of folks it’s a no-brainer to go this route versus investing in a 30 year-old floppy drive that will ultimately use 30 year old decaying disks.
On top of that, the original GoTek device’s user experience is pretty lacking and is kind of a pain in the butt to use.īut, the Sirens sing: the typical barebones GoTek solution is *really* damned cheap. I’ve seen so many hack jobs over the years that right off the bat the very concept of using such a device was a major turn off for me. For the longest time I’ve been avoiding the GoTek, which is a digital floppy disk emulator and hardware replacement that allows Amiga disk images (ADFs) to be put onto USB sticks and loaded just like they were original floppy disks.