Floppy drive emulator in old test equipment - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / repair

author: branadic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 06, 2021, 03:11:41 pm
content: Hi,I came across that SFR1M44-U100 floppy drive emulators and was wondering how many of you already successfully replaced the floppy drive with such USB drives in old test equipment and what is your experience with them?-branadic-

author: shakalnokturn
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 06, 2021, 11:37:49 pm
content: Hallo!I have one fitted in a LeCroy 9354, at the time I bought it I didn't have much success getting it to work as such and designed a little added logic to handle the /DSKCHG line, it's used as is since. (The emulator's casing was reworked to fit the scope, I wanted a cheap model and with 7 segment display.)Sam ("scopeman" here) the LeCroy@groups.io administrator who I was in touch with over the matter has since reported he had one working in the same situation without added electronics so I don't know if that's due to me having low electronics skills and missing something very obvious or the emulator's firmware having evolved.The emulator can be handy if you really need the floppy drive, in my case it's useful mainly for reliable firmware updates, I don't use it much for screen dumps where I prefer a serial link to the PC where the file can be renamed as soon as it's transferred.

author: HB9EVI
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 07, 2021, 08:43:43 am
content: I just dumped the floppy drive from my Akai S2000 replacing it with one of those Gotek drives.it didn't run as smoothly as expected due to the recent change of the mcu by the producer; first they changed from STM32 to some 'Artery' ARM micro; on that platform they use 3 different types, whereas the most recent was just freshly implemented in the most commonly used firmware for these emulators (FlashFloppy and HxC).there seem to be some more problems about that change from STM32 to Artery due to the smaller RAM (64k vs 32k) for certain purposes (e.g. DD vs. HD floppy emulation)In the end I stucked with FlashFloppy on my Gotek; I'm able to use preformated HD floppy files, but the S2000 doesn't succeed to format them itself.

author: SilverSolder
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 07, 2021, 01:16:40 pm
content: I tried using an emulator in an older Agilent 'scope, but found it a little unreliable, I went back to using floppies...

author: Audiorepair
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 07, 2021, 01:30:57 pm
content: I tried using an emulator in a Roland Keyboard.Didn't work.

author: HB9EVI
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 07, 2021, 05:38:53 pm
content: out-of-the-box with the generic firmware, they are maximally usable on i386 architecture; many devices using floppies are using their own formats, and the generic firmware is unable to handle those formats, which can be smaller or bigger than the common 720kB/1,44MBso it's almost certainly mandatory to flash another firmware on the emulator to make it run in the non-PC spherelike I said, there are two possibilities: FlashFloppy and HxCFlashFloppy is entirely open source and supports with most recent 3.29 release also the newest Goteks with the AT32F415KBU microcontroller. Though being compatible with the HxC file format (.hfe), there can be problems due to the reduced ram on the Artery mcuHxC is closed source; you have to buy the bootloader before being able to flash the firmware. I didn't succeed to get it running on the most recent Gotek with my S2000. HxC supplies a long list with supported devices where are both measurement and musical instruments. The author of the firmware offers limited individual support when struggling with bleeding edge hardware.

author: branadic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 08, 2021, 06:41:03 am
content: Thanks folks. Wow, that sounds promissing to fail. I've one showing up soon to upgrade my Advantest R9211 Spectrum Analyzers / FFT Servo Analyzer, but I'm now warned that it might never work.-branadic-

author: SilverSolder
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 08, 2021, 11:18:18 am
content: It's worth a try!

author: TomWinTejas
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2023, 03:05:31 am
content: Quote from: branadic on October 08, 2021, 06:41:03 amDid you wind up trying? I've got an Advantest spectrum analyzer that I'd like to convert if you had any luck.