Gotek queries

[XPD]

About to order a Gotek drive for my A500, and just wondering how it handles multidisk games - is it literally a single "drive" and I've got to "swap" discs, or can it mount more than one ADF at a time to avoid the disc swap fun ?

Also, does it emulate at the normal speed or can you give increase the read speed similar to UAE ?

TIA

[jbenam]

It's pretty much a single drive and you will have to swap ADFs for most games.

For a limited subset of games (some of which are the heaviest offenders when it comes to swapping) there are premade "autoswap" versions available which will swap disks automatically when required by the game to do so: https://github.com/keirf/FF_AutoSwap

It can't be automated as a process, so there are few games available as autoswap as they need to be manually fixed.

You will need the Flashfloppy firmware on your Gotek to use that function though. I do expect most if not every pre-flashed Gotek out there to already have Flashfloppy on it. If you are purchasing a "stock" Gotek, you will need to flash it yourself:

Instructions here (and on plenty of other threads on EAB):
https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy

And lastly, alas, no speedups when it comes to reading speed

[Rissy]

As above, but a good way to remember is that a Gotek is a Floppy drive emulator which uses a USB stick in place of an old floppy disk. So your storage media isn't prone to wearing down and data slowly becoming corrupt, or damaged through mishandling etc.

I'm a new owner of a Gotek myself and literally just set it up over the weekend there. They only support two files formats. .ADF (non writable) .HFE (Rev 3) (writable). I've found that there doesn't seem to be any harm writing every thing as .HFE, even games that don't require you to write to them (for writable games, I'm talking about disks which have a save game functionality - Pinball Dreams etc) - yes, you can still save your high scores and game save positions etc!

Physically, I found my Gotek an extremely tight squeeze to fit into my A500. I had to do a bit of "manipulation" to make it fit properly. But now that it's in, I have to say it's brilliant. I just cant see the need for going back to a floppy drive again now. Although I do have two external floppy drives there, for just in case purposes. In their case though, I could only use those for copyinig/reading/writing purposes. Not to boot up a game with. I made sure i'd backed up all my old disks ahead of fitting my Gotek, and tested all my disks to make sure they all worked so that I had confidence the digital copies would work ok, but even then, the Gotek seems a lot less fickle when reading files compared to using old floppy disks. If it works, it keeps working. If it doesn't work, it'll never work. So at least you know where you're at with it straight away.

You wont regret buying one. But it wont speed up your life unfortunately.

[XPD]

Thanks for that guys, looking at this one : https://amigastore.eu/en/676-interna...nd-1200.html#/

Handy to know about HFE vs ADF, was something I hadn't come across before

Boring part will be converting ADF -> HFE I guess

I am looking to get something like the HC508 at some stage too, which will help.

[Rissy]

Originally Posted by XPD

Thanks for that guys, looking at this one : https://amigastore.eu/en/676-interna...nd-1200.html#/

Handy to know about HFE vs ADF, was something I hadn't come across before

Boring part will be converting ADF -> HFE I guess

I am looking to get something like the HC508 at some stage too, which will help.

I bought mine from AmigaStore.eu too. I got the all singing, all dancing variant with the OLED screen (I definitely recommend this!). It came pre-flashed with Flashfloppy v3.25 (latest). I'd say i wasted my money getting a 32GB stick from them though. I'd get the smallest stick they do. You probably wont even fill 4GB, but importantly, unless you know where else to get the base files which sit on the stick, then this is what you're paying for. I use the easy to use menu system on it with the preinstalled AUTOBOOT file and the configurable CONFIG file which allows you to put some or all your files into a quickly accessible subset of the whole sticks worth of programs using an on-screen display. I've simply ordered my files on the stick between two folders (APPLICATIONS & GAMES) and then within GAMES, i've ordered all my games into 26 folders (A,B,C,D etc). I've got many games, and literally hundreds of disks imaged on the Gotek, with a subset of about 100 in my quick menu.

You don't need to convert all your disk images into .HFE from .ADF Only the disks which you hope to want to write to. So save disks or game disks with a save function within the game. If you use the HxC image conversion tool "HxCFloppyEmulator_soft.zip" @ https://hxc2001.com/download/floppy_drive_emulator/

This makes quick work of the few disks you'll want to convert.

I took images of all my disks as .SCP initially, and then put those through this tool. Works a charm.

Be warned about AmigaStore.eu though. I only received my Gotek in the middle of last week and I ordered it on the 28th March! They blamed Brexit, and I don't find them particularly communicative, and after a 6 week delay on my order, it still arrived incomplete, which they are now currently trying to fix (They missed cables I needed, and because they forgot to pack them, I've already bought from Ebay, and they arrived in only a few days, which is what allowed me to get up and running with it all over the weekend)

[XPD]

Thanks @rissy

I'm fine with shipping time etc, nothing ever arrives quickly in NZ