Gotek floppy emulator not working

[Cooljerk]

I'm stumped as to the problem. I have two different gotek floppies and I'm trying to run them on two different amigas in two different setups, and I'm getting the same results.

The first is installed into an A1200 with an scan doubler/flicker fixer installed to output to a VGA monitor. The selector menu boots up fine, but when I select an adf to load, the screen scrambles and turns into what looks like rolling static lines, almost like it's at a resolution or something that isn't compatible. The machine doesn't respond until I turn it on and off.

Second gotek, completely different one, is connected to an Amiga CD32 with an SX-1 attachment via a floppy-drive->IDE ribbon. The CD32 itself is connected via SVideo to an Atlona CDM 660 PAL->NTSC converter which is then connected to my NTSC TV. This CD32 has never given me problems with any PAL software on this TV before (it's a PAL CD32). Again, the Gotek menu boots up fine, but when I select an adf, I get rolling static.

I've tried a variety of ADFs and USB drives and nothing works. Is this a problem with the images I'm using? Maybe some sort of problem with cracks on these images? The second Gotek drive I got came with a USB key that contained lots of ADFs, and none of those load either.

I have a CF-Kit installed in each machine, but I'm interested in archiving my remaining, working Amiga floppy disks onto USB drives so that I'll retain the original function of my Amigas. I have an SD2EIC for a Commodore 64 as well and that emulator has problems with certain cracked loaders, is that what's going on with this drive? Anybody know what could be causing this?

[Jope]

Try a normal workbench 1.3 image? Those don't force the screen mode.

[Cooljerk]

Originally Posted by Jope

Try a normal workbench 1.3 image? Those don't force the screen mode.

ok, I've figured out some more. After I select my images through the Gotek adf selector images, I get garbage on the screen and it hangs. But if I reset my CD32 then, the LED indicator on the Gotek moves to 001 letting me know it mounted my first image and indeed the adf file usually boots.

I get into a lot of cracked intros and can progress through them with a mouse click, but right when they need to load the actual game, they all seem to hang on black screens. I've waited for half an hour to see if they progress, nothing. The green indicator on the Gotek floppy emulator never flashes, indicating the drive isn't being accessed.

What's weird is if I try a workbench ADF file, the thing doesn't load at all. I get the workbench shell telling me to put in disk d0. Same thing happens if I use the official turrican adf images from factor 5's websites.

I'm thinking this might actually be a problem with these loaders and maybe a ram issue with the CD32. Doesn't the presence of a CD drive take up some ram? Does the SX-1 add ram to the machine by default? I've seen, for example, cracked versions of Turrican 2 in 2 adf files. I can load the first, which eventually gets to a black screen before the game begins. However my real, working copy of Turrican 2 came on one single floppy. And if I connect a normal external floppy drive to the CD32, the real turrican 2 floppy works fine.

I guess the next step is to just make an adf image from my real turrican 2 floppy.

Haven't tried on my real A1200. Forgive my inexperience, but what is the keyboard command to soft reboot an Amiga?

Anybody still want to weigh in on this? Could this be general incompatibility between the A1200 and A500?

[Jope]

Ctrl-amiga-amiga to reboot.

Keep at it until you can boot to workbench 1.3 with the workbench 1.3 adf. I recommend getting it to work on the A1200 first, then after you're sure the Gotek is ok, you can start tackling the CD32 specific problems.

[Cooljerk]

K, I guess I'll try making an ADF out of my actual workbench disks tonight on my A1200 and see if that works. I'm wondering if this is a RAM problem on my CD32. I previously had one of those CD32 floppy drive expansions, not the SX-1 or SX-32, and it would hang on many games with black screens because the presence of said expansion board ate up a tiny bit of ram, to the point where stuff like Joe & Mac wouldn't boot.

My A1200 had an additional 2MB of ram installed via PCMCIA so hopefully it works alright with the images.

[Jope]

The reason why I recommended 1.3 is that there is absolutely no Amiga that can't boot that. Even a 256k A1000 can do it.

[Cooljerk]

Originally Posted by Jope

The reason why I recommended 1.3 is that there is absolutely no Amiga that can't boot that. Even a 256k A1000 can do it.

Doh curse my selective dyslexia, totally saw 3.1 lol

I'll try and find an image of 1.3, thanks!

[Cooljerk]

Fiddled with them for a while tonight and got both working Rebooting the A1200 did the trick after loading the adfs.

The problem with the CD32 was that I had the drive set as fd0 instead of fd1. Moved the jumper and it works fine now.

This is pretty neat! I'm gonna back up the games I have that still work, and try and find non-cracked copies of games whose disks have died.

[Jope]

Good to hear you got it working.

The reboot is a given, the bootblock for the new disk isn't read unless the machine is rebooted.

[Cooljerk]

Well the option when selecting the adfs is "save and reboot" so I'd expect the machine to reboot when selecting that option. Seems, instead, it reboots the gotek floppy emulator itself, not the amiga machine. Bit of a misnomer.

[Jope]

Ah, I've only tried my gotek once, so I don't remember whether it actually succeeded in rebooting my machine or not. :-D

It's possible to code a reboot routine that doesn't work on all Amigas, so it might be that this one has an A500 only reboot routine. :-)