Flopper

[XorA]

Did you have a chance to see if your 3 digit 1.44Mb Gotek Drive will work with a Trump Card as a 720k drive?

My suspicion would be that like modern PC drives they are permanently hardwired to 1.44Mb mode.

[RWAP]

I have tried one of these Flopper interfaces from Zaxon.

As suspected, it appears that they will not work with the Trump Card, which reports 'Drive Not Found' after trying to read the disk image on the USB stick.

Oddly, the Gold Card will read the same DD disk image without any problems.

Any ideas?

[robsoft]

OK, I got one of those GoTek drives, the 720kB one, from China. It was cheap on eBay, I can provide a link if anyone is interested.

I format the USB key using the ipcas software that everyone says you should use. I tell it I want 100x 720Kb floppies, and it appears to make them. Note that I understand at this point, those are theoretically PC format floppies.

I take the key to the QL, where I've plugged the GoTek drive into my Trump card, and it is operating as FLP1_

I use a 'FORMAT FLP1_TEST' command and it comes back after a short while saying 714/720 sectors. I sort-of expected to see 1434/1440 or whatever the figure with true 720Kb floppies tends to be.

So I try to copy from a very full floppy over to the GoTek, thinking maybe the sector 'size' is different on this beast, and it complains 'disk full' with about half of the data copied. This is reproducible with different 'floppies' within the GoTek and I even tried a different USB key.

In all other respects it seems to work fine - I can save files to it, I can press the button and 'change' to another floppy, I can save files, I can flip between 2 floppies using RAM1_ as a temporary holding space etc, everything survives a reset etc etc.... all is good apart from the fact that the Gotek floppies appear to be half the expected size.

Anyone advise me that I'm missing a step, or doing something stupid? I haven't had a chance to format the USB key as a series of 1.44Mb floppies and then tell the QL to format a given 'floppy', but I assumed that because I needed to get the 720kB drive, I would be telling their tool to make me 720Kb floppies too.

[Silvester]

The Trump card FLP driver does a check to see if track 55 exists before attempting a format. Perhaps the trick it uses to determine 40/80 drive fails on the GoTek device.

You can use the FLP_TRACK command beforehand to restrict size of FORMAT (ie. to avoid damaging a 40 track drive that doesn't have a mechanical end stop!).

Have you tried using FLP_TRACK 80 ?

I think it overrides the auto-check because I can give it silly values on my Trump card machine (eg. FLP_TRACK 82) and FORMAT returns OK!

BTW although you can't read PC format disks ordinarily on a Trump card QL, you can read/write it using direct sector access.

Attached a program I use to check whole 80 track disk for read errors (if you want to see contents of sector remove REMark from line 215).

Perhaps you could just try writing to a sector in track 55 of disk image to prove it exists:

DIM a$(512) : a$=FILL$('X',512)
OPEN#3;'flp1_*d2d'
PUT#3\1+55*65536,a$
a$=FILL$(' ',512)
GET#3\1+55*65536,a$
CLOSE#3
PRINT a$

If FLP_TRACK 80 fails and the lines above work then that leaves two possibilities: (1) derive a QL 720K image by other means and copy as required, or (2) replicate the Trump card format routine less the track 55 check.

(ebay link please?)

Code: Select all

100 WHEN ERRor
110 x%=1 : z%=z%+1
120 END WHEN
130 :
140 CLS#0 : CLS : PRINT 'Track','Side','Sector'\\
150 DIM a$(512) : a$=FILL$(' ',512) : x%=0 : z%=0
160 OPEN#3;'flp1_*d2d'
170 FOR t%=0 TO 79
180   FOR d%=0 TO 1
190     FOR s%=1 TO 9
200       AT#0;0,0 : PRINT#0;'Trk'!t%,'Side'!d%,'Sector'!s%;'              '
210       GET#3\s%+d%*256+t%*65536,a$
215       REMark CLS : PRINT A$ : PAUSE -1
220       IF x% THEN PRINT t%,d%,s%,'bad sector' : x%=0
230       IF CODE(INKEY$)=27 THEN PRINT 'premature end' : EXIT t%
240     END FOR s%
250   END FOR d%
260 END FOR t%
270 CLOSE#3 : CLS#0 : IF z% THEN PRINT#0;z%!'bad sectors' : ELSE PRINT#0;'disk OK'

[robsoft]

Brilliant, I'll give that a try tomorrow - thank you!

Here's the link. It took about a week to come (ordered from the UK, the goodies are in China of course).

5V SFRM72-TU100K 3.5 USB 720KB Floppy Drive Emulator For Industrial Equipment

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/-/131630329721?roken=cUgayN

[Silvester]

Thanks. Here's a suitable Trump card formatted disk image, etc.

[StarshipUK]

This has to be slowest ongoing project ever but months back I bought one of these:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Amiga-Atari-S ... 2081411589

A Gotek with HxC firmware loaded. I also managed to get hold of some converted QL games in HFE format and it works.

The next stage is to buy a copy of Q-emulator (order page is down at the moment!) to have a go at creating some more HFE games images myself, although from memory I believe someone said at some point that the BOOT files on some games (which I notice open in Notepad) may need to be edited to work as floppy disks\with the gotek\as HFE images.