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Amiga Gotek F Font
Amiga Gotek F F 150

Many Amiga 500 games fail and it is very frustrating. You can use degraders, Relokick and so on, but it is still annoying. One can of course go with WHD-Load, but that is not the point, we are talking about Gotek here. Even though I’m happy with the Gotek, I see myself being more satisfied with this device in an Amiga 500 with 1 MB RAM. (Amiga f/w free download) HxC Floppy Disk Drive Emulator. The HxC Floppy Drive Emulator is a Universal Floppy Disk Emulator, developed by Jean-Fran ois Del Nero (Jeff). It began life as a way to emulate the 3.5' disk drives on Atari ST and Commodore Amiga computers and has developed into a solution that can replace floppy disk drives in a wide.

The Commodore Amiga A1200

Storage Upgrade Options

'Floppy Disk'

'Floppy Disk' Emulation

Although the Amiga may have a hard disk (real or emulated) installed, a floppy disk is still needed to run much of the Amiga software that was written to run only from, often a bootable, floppy disk. Even though you may have the original floppy disk media available, it is likely to be 25 to 30 years old and will become even more prone to failure as time goes on, not to mention the long term reliability issues surrounding mechanical floppy disk drives. What is needed is a reliable way to emulate a floppy disk, that allows the Amiga to boot from it and appear to the system to be a 'real' floppy disk.

This page contains details of two solutions that I know work, there may be others, but the devices on this page are enough for me.

Feature

Comparison

HxC Floppy Disk Emulator

Gotek Floppy Disk Emulator

Form factor	Standard 3.5' FDD shown, others available	Standard 3.5' FDD only
Available Colours	White, Black (labels or powder coated)	White, Black, Grey
Construction	Metal shown, some models in plastic cases	Plastic only
User interface
Display	2 Line x 16 Character LCD	0, 2, or 3 7-segment LED (0-999)
Controls	3 Buttons	2 Buttons
Sound	Audible beeper to emulate drive sounds	None (user modification possible)
Host software	Amiga. Amstrad CPC & Atari as standard	Default - none
Host software	Customisation possible	Custom - Amiga (unofficial firmware)
Disk Interface	PC, Shughart compatible	PC
Devices emulated	Two concurrent	Single drive
Drive IDs available	4	2
Target systems	Wide range of computers and industrial	Default - PC only
Target systems	equipment	Custom -Amiga (unofficial)
Media	SD Card	USB pen drive
Images per card	Only limited by SD card capacity	1000 per USB device
e.g., 16,000 720k floppies on a 32GB card
Formats available	Multiple, including PC, Amiga, Atari, etc.	Default - PC only
Formats available	Custom - Amiga (unofficial firmware)
Source	Lotharek's Lair - sole manufacturer	(OEM, Gotek do not supply retail)
Buy from his web-store or from ebay	Both PC and Amiga models are on ebay
Cost	$60-$100, depending on model	$20-$30, with default firmware
Cost	(Amiga f/w free download)

HxC Floppy Disk Drive Emulator

The HxC Floppy Drive Emulator is a Universal Floppy Disk Emulator, developed by Jean-François Del Nero (Jeff). It began life as a way to emulate the 3.5' disk drives on Atari ST and Commodore Amiga computers and has developed into a solution that can replace floppy disk drives in a wide range of computers, music samplers and a range of industrial machines - in fact, just about anything that has a floppy drive interface.

There are two main kinds of HxC :-

A USB version which allows connection of the floppy disk drive interface of the target hardware to a PC via a USB cable.
An SD Card version which emulates floppy disk drives with disk images stored on an SD card

Full details of the HxC Emulator can be found on either

The HxC 2001 Home Page - Jeff's site, or
The Lotharek's Lair Site - Przemyslaw Krawczyk's (Lotharek) site (Lotherek manufactures the hardware)

I have already purchased an HxC Emulator for use with my Memotech computers, an expanded description and pictures of the different HxC form factors can be found on my Memotech FDX disk upgrade page. The photo above is of the type 'F', this has a form factor the same as standard 3.5' floppy drive, external devices are also available as well as a 'headless' model with no user interface - the user interacts with the drive using a custom software interface which is available for, Atari, Amiga and Amstrad CPC computers.

The HxC is a very good and flexible deign, well suited to use with a range of hardware, however, as the table above shows, it is significantly more expensive than the Gotek emulator.

Gotek Floppy Disk Emulator

Background

The Gotek Floppy Disk Emulator is designed to replace floppy drives of various formats in devices using PC compatible floppy drives. The hardware is quite simple, consisting of a single PCB, at the heart of which is a 72MHz ARM Cortex M3 based STM32 MCU which translates image file data into floppy disk track & sector format in real time.

Development

Gotek only write firmware to support PC formats, but it is possible to re-flash the MCU with replacement firmware, currently, the only 'available' option is for the Amiga - Gotek emulators re-flashed with Amiga compatible firmware are being sold by quite a few vendors on ebay. These devices have been very popular with Amiga owners and I was recommended to get one of these to replace/supplement the FDD in my Amiga A1200.

Provenance

I was all set to buy from one of these ebay vendors when I came across the origin of this great piece of programming - it was created by Hervé Messinger, without reverse engineering or otherwise copying the Gotek firmware, Hervé created his own firmware that can emulate the custom, non-PC compatible, disk format of the Amiga range. Hervé has generously made the binary (but not the source) of the firmware available for free download on his blog 'Transform the Gotek Floppy Emulator into an Amiga Floppy emulator', but has placed an entirely reasonable condition on it that 'software provided on this page can’t be sold directly or indirectly into a pre-flashed device'.

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This presents us with something of a moral dilemma, leaving aside the unscrupulous ebay box shifters who are out to make a quick profit, a few Amiga users have re-flashed Gotek drives with Hervé's firmware and made them available to other Amiga owners, making a small charge for the service. There is no doubt that some Amiga owners would not be happy to undertake this fairly simple procedure (fully described on Herv