[Techtoolslist] Using a USB floppy emulator with the Fluke 9100

[John Robertson]

On 2018/08/11 6:56 PM, Tony Jones wrote:
> There's been a few posts in the last few days about floppies.
> Archiving them,  trying to get them working etc.
>
> There are two parts to the problem:
>
> 1. Archiving existing media. Ideally in a) a consistent format b) in a
> way which allows the status of the disks to be known (bad sectors,
> modified disks etc).     What Ian has come up with is a huge
> improvement over the mess that was previously on the ftp site.
>
> 2. Taking one of the images in an archive and writing it to a blank
> floppy so it can be installed onto the 9100.
>
> The second of these requires two working floppy drives, one on your PC
> to create the image and another on the Fluke to read it.  It also
> requires a supply of blank floppy disks.      SamDisk won't work with
> USB floppy drives connected to a PC, so you need an older PC mainboard
> with a floppy interface.
>
> I know I'm not the first person to do this but it's possible to use
> one of the commodity USB Floppy Emulators such as the Gotek
> (http://www.gotek.in/) with the Fluke 9100.
>
> Pictures of my 9105FT with the Gotek installed are here.
> https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1t9FjN-5rI7PCDkevseEc4bJ1QMS9hPk1?usp=sharing
>
> I think the Gotek cost me $17 shipped.
>
> I'm running the free Flash Floppy firmware
> (https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy)  You will need a USB->serial
> header adapter to initially flash this.   I've also performed the
> common mod to add an i2c lcd display ($3) which allows you to select
> images by name on the front panel.    I plan to add the small speaker
> to minic the drive head sound (after using it for a while I miss the
> audio confirmation that something is taking place).
>
> Geir Fraser who wrote the Xen hypervisor wrote Flash Floppy, he also
> wrote disk-utilities which supports converting from Kryoflux stream
> format to HFE, one of the formats supported by Flash Floppy.      It's
> possible to have hundreds of floppy images stored on the Gotek
> (limited only by the size of the USB stick) and you can select which
> one is active via the two switches on the drive.
>
> You can boot images (service disk etc) off the Gotek using SOFT+F2+F4
> or you can use it as the source for an fd0->hdd copy.   If you have a
> 9105FT which has two floppy bags you can install a DPDT switch onto
> the drive 0/1 select lines and install a Gotek and a standard floppy
> and switch between them (normally the firmware when configured for
> 9100 mode only sees FD0).
>
> You'll need to set the interface type to "shugart" in FF.CFG on the
> root of your USB stick, other than this it's plug and play.
>
> HTH.
>
> Tony
Hi Tony,

Thank you for sharing this most useful information, can you tell us 
which setting you have the 9100 set to for the Floppy Emulator?

I have to wonder if the 9100 can utilize two Floppies if one pokes 
around with the configuration. Then one can have a working floppy drive 
along with the emulator and the SCSI2SD and have all the bells and whistles!

Thanks,

John :-#)#
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