Nice work dude! 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.
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HxC Floppy Emulators project page. HxC Firmware for Gotek. The HxC Floppy Emulator software allows to create an virtual FAT12 (Atari.
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. 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. 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 ?. 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. 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 insideSo, 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 USART1TX 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 GotekI’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. 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? 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!
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. 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 ?. 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. 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.Buti 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 ERRORso i don’t understand what’s going on?I don’t know if I should make different proceduresHope you can help me.Thank you in advance and sorry if my english isn’t perfect ?Best regardsFabrizio. Escom amiga’s were modified to use standard PC floppies. That’s why they have problems with custom amiga floppies that rely on trackloader.device, or better said, most of older games. Unfortunately this also prevents them from using real amiga floppy drives and H.M.’s firmware is set to behave exactly as original amiga drive.To fix this you have to open your A1200, take out motherboard and « fix » one wire that’s under the board (that’s why you have to take it out). Picture is worth more than words so check this out. 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 together3v from the TTL to the 5v power plug on the drive.
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. 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 LeCroyOwnersGroup on Yahoo! Groups here: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 comJust 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 RegardsBen. 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 comJust 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. First of all: many thanks for this fantastic thing! 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 youThanks in AdvanceBen. 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? Thanks for the firmware.
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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. First of all thanks a lot for your great work!!I found a bugSome 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 bugThere 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 followingLoaded 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 workbenchThe adf became corruptedI found after comparing the md5 checksums to the adf i have on the harddisk on pc. 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. 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 »? 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!
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 preferAnyway 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. Just some reminds about USB sticks format and partitionsSome 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. @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 regardsKent Aka:Pendragon on the Mod Scene where i have contributed in many projects with both development and test/hacks ❤. 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? 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? 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.
Great work, reallyI’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 youIf 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. 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! 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.
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.
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. 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$! He did a great service for retro computing enthusiastics just for few euros, it’s like paying a friend couple of beers for his help.When Ltac does not offer them on amibay anymore, people will buy them from some parasite who make.real. profit out of your work and you are fool if you think you can stop them.And no, I am not Ltac or his friend. He is making profit from this. 1$ 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. 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 basicP.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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.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. 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 firmwarei 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. 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.
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? 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.
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 IVX-Surf 100OS 3.9+Roadshow 1.11.
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). 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.
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March 2023
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