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I really really LOVED the flip out style drive cage! Those things were great. And other units in this same case even had a place with raised spots to mount another hard drive.... With the holes already drilled.
I loved those cases. They were ine of my favorite cases of the era and of any brand. And by the time this machine came along Tandy sound had been surpassed by the very common sound cards that were just everywhere. And of course VGA had long surpassed CGA and the geeat 16 color Tandy graphics. So those features wouldn't make sense in this particular pc. But it is a well designed machine and had soooooo much integration on the motherboard.
@@thesteeges Smart move to keep them in the garage for now! I am just curious to find out if they work. 😁 Awesome restoration project you’re taking on.
I just managed to get a new gotek fully working with an amstrad ppc640...its on the supported list, but the documentation is a little terse in the end, in the FF.CFG I specified "interface = shugart" rather than the more common sense "ibmpc" to overcome the problem with disk changes not being detected under "ibmpc" on the ppc I left "host = pc-dos" Once working I moved it from drive B: to drive A: which needed me to move jumper from D1 to D0 now the fun of loading my USB stick with text adventure games like "lurking horror"...and getting a second drive to work with amiga/atari st/bbc micro
SEGA CDX, Turbo Graphyx CD and Turbo Express were 3 consoles I wanted really bad in my childhood. In retrospect, they were all crap. But they were exciting crap…
I would like to thank you for the help!!! Finally my GOTEK is running as drive B: in my AMSTRAD 1512dd (memory upgrade to 640). It is so easy now to test millions of files….. THANK YOU!!! 👏👏👏👏🙏🙏🙏
fun videos, Did you have any problems getting the 1gb module to work? I saw you put it as auto in bios, but did you have to partition it in fdisk? I saw somewhere that the 2500 series can only take a 528mb drive max. just picked up a 2500 rsx that is absolutely mint, and want to pull out the 61mb conner which has a factory install on it of dos and deskmate.
Thanks for the video - i flat out cannot get this to work. I ordered one off of eBay from NESynth that was supposed to work with the Coco…. It didn’t. I noticed it was the “new version” CPU, so flashed it to FlashFloppy. Flash Floppy shows up on the oled, i can select a disk on the oled, but i can’t get it to work. All I get is “IO Error” from my Coco. I’ve tried multiple cables, two different controllers and it just flat out doesn’t work. I have a physical floppy that works great and used the same controller and cables and all I can get out of this thing is “IO Error”… anybody have any suggestions? I have an a CocoSDC that works great, but I’d love to tandem this with my physical drive to make copies….
I just wonder... I had 3 double sided drives on my CoCo 3. Originally RS-DOS allowed 35 tracks, it was modified by some CoCo owners to read and write 40 tracks. When 720k drives came out the amount of tracks doubled from 40 to 80, again CoCo owners modified RS-DOS to read and write all 80 tracks. The amount of data on the disk increased when the tracks were doubled, however there were limitations as only track 17 was used for the directory meaning you could still only have 72 files on a disk, for the most part this was not very limiting as most disks were full before you got to that 72 file limit. Later when 1.2 5.25 inch disks and 1.44 3.5 inch disk were introduced, the data rates were doubled as each track had double the data per track. This time some people added a hardware modification to over clock the floppy controller to read and write at the faster data rates. Please note: Not all floppy controller can be modified to read the faster data rates. The CoCo's RS-DOS has a second limitation, it sees only one side of the floppy drive, however it can access both sides again through modifying RS-DOS. After modifying RS-DOS to access both sides, the system still only sees each double sided floppy drive as being 2 separate drives. Drive 0 is the side normally read and written when using a single sided drive and be formatted identically to a single sided floppy, and Drive 1 would be the opposing side of the same disk. Now for the third limitation... CoCo 1, 2, and 3's when having both single and double sided floppy drives can not tell how many track the drive or floppy has. It is up to the user to know this. If you put a 40 track disk into a 80 track drive, RS-DOS can not figure out what is going on. There is a patch for this, but the patch is one that needs to be done after the system is booted and places in ALL RAM mode. All RAM mode copies all RS-DOS, BASIC, EXTENDED basic ROM data to RAM memory then switches the ROM out of the system and uses only RAM or "ALL RAM". This can be done in 64k systems only, as 23k systems did now have memory located in the addresses need to do this. Once in ALL RAM mode a basic program would poke data into the appropriate RAM locations and would make the floppy drives double step. allowing a 40 track drive to be read properly. You could then also switch back to not double stepping by restoring the original data and there by wiping out the code for double stepping. To copy a 40 track floppy from and 80 track disk was done using special software. You would tell the software which drive was 40 track and which was 80 track, then place 1 40 track floppy into the 80 track drive, the program would copy from the 80 track to the 40 track drive. Writing a 60 track floppy with an 80 track was feasible, however it should be a blank disk. The tracks on an 40 track floppy are twice as wide as an 80 track floppy. Writing 40 tracks to an 80 track floppy means on half of the track is written to. That means reading it would be reading the new data, but also possibly un-erased old data at the same time. That however brings me to my problem. I would love to have a GOTEK if it can assign it as drive 4 and 5. This is easy with physical drives as drive select 3 becomes the side select, and drive select 0, 1, and 2 remain drive selects for drives 0, 1, 2. Select 0 selects both drive 0 and drive 1 with the side select determining which "drive". The same for drive select 1 only it selects drive 2 and 3, and drive select 2 selects drives 4 and 5. Having the GOTEK know which drive is selected by decoding the drive select. This would allow me to assign a separate floppy image to each drive, or have one large floppy image that contains each side of the floppy. In a CoCo 1, 2, or 3 that would mean two directory listings each on track 17 with the drive 3 selector telling the GOTEK which one to use.
Normally the Tandy floppy disk controllers only contain DS0-DS2, and they used the side-select as DS3, for four single-sided disks. You could (and I'm sure others have done it already) use a 3-8 demultiplexer to map up to 8 double-sided drives to the available RS-DOS disk slots. Software can patch the drive table on the fly to assign any side of any drive to one of the four slots.
I'm guessing the included dev tools are BASIC09, editor, and a 6309/6809 assembler? I was reading about the old Microware C Compiler and I would love to see if that is still an option under NitrOS-9 in order to code K&R C right on the COCO!
There are a LOT of gotek drives out there for sale that seem to be configured for everything but MS-DOS. is this because Goteks are defaultly configured to work with MS-DOS/Windows? I know they have to be configured / firmware flashed to work with a lot of other devices out there, i just figured i'd have come across gotek for windows and it does seem like in my many years of seeing goteks, it seems like amiga's were the biggest users of this and a number of MIDI synths / samplers that could use a floppy drive..
I think by default GoTek targets this as a IBM PC floppy drive replacement but the market that buys these in mass are the people who have floppy drives in everything but an IBM PC. PC users have been able to upgrade to modern storage as PC's have evolved but these other products that use floppy drives haven't had that luxury; so this meshing of new solid-state usb drives with old floppy based hardware is a golden ticket to those users. That's my perspective of it.
@@killer2600 OK thanks for that. It certainly makes sense that PC floppy as default makes sense given they would be the single biggest floppy drive platform of all time. sure other systems might have needed 3.5" floppies exclusively for storage, but in terms of sheer numbers of devices that had 3.5" drives, had to be PC. It's just been in my experience i've only had gotek for non PC devices so that's great to hear really. I'd like to enhance my vintage pcs with goteks as the 3.5" drives fail rather than moving to the next old PC floppy that will fail eventually.
I was trying a SD2IDE card on a 486, but no luck. I can succesfully BIOS autodetect and run fdisk and format c: but after reboot, nothing is seen. System hangs on harddisk detection. Thinking about buying a Gotek drive, but is it bound to the 1.44 MB size limit?
It's bound to behaving as a floppy drive and all the standards there-of. It's connected to the floppy drive cable/connector so the limitation of acting as a floppy drive is a firm physical limit.
@@killer2600 It must depend on the controller. They are all the same Chinese boards that exist for years. Possibly, it lacks the bus frequency to communicate using the data-cable. But they have spi output for external displays so they are pretty advanced. Maybe a future version...
The key to your 486 is to set a decently large size type 45 or 46. Use IBM Ontrack overlay. It will handle the rest. You can mount the SD on Linux using a loop volume and offset 64512. You can copy whatever to the drive. I know it is a year later. Hopefully that helps someone.
@@njspencer79 The BIOS has a list of known disks of which nothing works. Type 48 and 49 are drives with custom C/H/S fields. I took over the values from another computer (P75) on which this card works but it doesn't on this computer. What overlay do I need? Is it a bootdisk?
@@manuell3505 Yes. Phil computer lab has them. Ontrack a couple versions are there. You pick a preset value in BIOS doesn't matter. Don't try to match the values. Just enough for first megabytes. I use like 45 or something. You write ontrack to disk. Boot with that disk. You setup partition via the disk. You will need offset I give above for Linux to mount that SD. I dunno about Windows. This is a software solution be inserting a bootloader and shifting the disk mapping. Hence the offset. It works great w/ large disks on older machines. With the caveat of an extra step to mount of a modern machine.
I assume the computer you installed this in was your Tandy 2500 RSX. I'm about to install a GoTek (I will be getting the older version without the OLED screen.) into my Tandy 2500 SX/33, and wanted to make sure there aren't any connection issues when plugging it into the motherboard. I assume it's a normal floppy connection. (And not some weird format like the Tandy 1000's had, with power going through the ribbon cable.)
I believe it should as long as the firmware of the instrument supports it. I know some people that use them with Yamaha keyboards. I hope that answers your question. Thank you for watching.
THANK YOU! I've been trying to make my modified Gotek work for a week now... FINALLY a simple set of instructions for make a disk image and how to transfer files!!! THANKS!
Good video. I've got real floppy drives and also a CoCoSDC, but I've also wanted to try a GoTek and just haven't shelled out for one yet. Just to nitpick a bit, IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics, and it refers to hard drives, not floppy drives. In particular, IDE drives have a 40-pin interface (the standard floppy interface used on the CoCo and elsewhere has 34 conductors). They are a development of the preceding ST-506 interface, but Integrated the Drive Electronics (ie, the hard drive controller card) onto the drive itself. The IDE interface has similar signals to a subset of the PC/AT bus, so that the remaining interface between an AT class computer and an IDE hard drive is minimal. After SATA drives came out, the old IDE drives were retroactively named PATA, for Parallel ATA. ATA, or AT Attachment was another name associated with IDE hard drives or optical drives. What makes things a little confusing is that the 34-pin connectors you crimp onto a ribbon cable for a floppy drive interface are called IDC, or Insulation Displacement Connectors, because when you crimp them on, little blades displace the plastic insulation to make contact with the conductors in the ribbon cable. Also, the CoCo uses a flat ribbon cable (no twist), and uses the actual Drive Select jumpers on the drives to select which drive is 0, 1, or 2. These jumpers were present on all the old drives, though for some incomprehensible reason, IBM chose to jumper them all to drive 1 and hack up their cables with a twist, just to make things unnecessarily complicated. Later floppy drives cheaped out and eliminated the jumpers, hard-wiring them all to drive 1. Some earlier, and less cheapo 3.5" drives still included drive select jumpers or switches. I know that my original CoCo floppy drive cable was just straight through, anyway, so it didn't matter at all which connector you plugged into what drive, just as long as the drive select jumpers were set the way you wanted them. I have heard that some floppy cables had missing pins that were used for drive select purposes. If your card edge connectors are specific to D0 or D1, maybe that's why. Does the GoTek have Drive Select jumpering? Is that what the jumper blocks do on that drive?
Josh is correct. Floppies predate ISA standards, All computers that had FLOPPIES used a Shugart Associates (later called Shugart Corporation) interface, or a modified variant of that interface. PC's used a non standard Shugart with a twist added to the cable In systems that have a twist in the cable the following pins were swapped: Pin 10 (drive 0*) becomes pin 16 (drive 0*) after the swap pin 12 (drive 1*) becomes pin 14 (drive 1*) after the swap pin 14 (drive 2*) becomes pin 12 (drive 2*) after the swap pin 16 (motoron*) becomes pin 10 (motoron*) after the swap *These are how these pins are assigned on the shugart interface. On a PC pin 10 and pin 14 is no longer connected to either disk drive internally, and other drives are set to drive 1, so drive selects 0 and 2 are never connected to either drive directly. In the shugart interface pin 10 selects drive 0, but in a PC it is not connected to the first drive and after the twist becomes the motoron select for the second drive. Again in the shugart interfeace pin 14 select selects drive 2, but in a PC it is not connected to the first drive and after the twist becomes drive 1 select for the second drive. Therefore both drives connect to drive 1 and motoron selects. but the twist changes which wire is drive 1 and motoron select. Tandy's disk drives of different eras and setups were setup in one of two ways. The first way was to jumper or short All drive selects on ALL drives, with teeth removed from the cable to prevent connection except to the appropriate drive. The second way was to jumper only the drive select that drive needed and leave all the teeth in the ribbon cable intact. Either way, ALL of the pins in the interface were used as intended and passed through all four possible single sided drives or all three double sided drives. An important fact to remember is that all odd numbered (pins 11, 13 and 15 as well as possibly pins 9 and 17 ) could be swapped without any changes to the system, all odd numbered pins were grounded. In a PC that meant ONLY 2 drives could be connected to the standard PC ribbon cable. If the computer needed a third or fourth drive, a second ribbon cable. In the standard shugart interface, since the was NO twist, ALL four drives could be attached to a single ribbon cable as was done with the Tandy computers from the Model 1 until Tandy started selling PC compatible machines. Also some will ask why three or four drives could be used on a Tandy when I have only spoke about three drive selects. Well pin 32 of Shugart and Tandy interfaces was used as a drive 3 select. Later when drives were made to be read on both sides, this connection was instead used to select which side of the floppy was read. Pin 32 as a side select was common to Shugart, Tandy and even PC's, only the twist separated the SHugart/Tandy cables from being used on a PC, and vice versa. However you could use a PC drive ribbon on a Tandy Color Computer if you modified the Disk Basic to correctly use two drive selects and two motor selects, however you would then be limited to only two floppy drives. PC's basically 'cheaped' out because most users would never more than 2 disk drives. It also made it more expensive for people to add additional drives ass you needed additional ribbon cables and usually additional controller cards.
Josh, I do know why IBM put the twist into their cables.. It allowed them to use another drive select as a motor select. They could then have two separate motor controls, and only spin up one drive motor rather than all drive motors at the same time using standard Shugart drives addressed as drive 1. This in turn reduced to power supply ratings because they did not need a beefier power supply. This was done to cut costs and reduce heat generation, a cheaper weaker power supply could run two drives. Back then power supplies were not as strong as some we have today, and if the drives were external, and had their own power supply it could be smaller and fit more easily into a floppy case without as much heating and ventilation needed.
@@RetroTechTime , Now it is time for a video showing how to setup the Gotek in combination with a real 5.25" and 3.5" drives on the same cable :D Muahahahah!
