Does this support gotek floppy drive simulator?

[GrantMeStrength]

I've an NC200 and I've swapped out the floppy for a gotek device, so now it reads .img files from USB drives.

Unfortunately it doesn't like the nc200.img, and thinks it's completely empty. Command Q does not work when that is the disk selected on the gotek.

I was wondering if you had a similar device and had tried to get this working on it? For me the alternative is to build tools and create my own .img file, which is fine. But it would be good to know if this has been tried :-)

[davidgiven]

I just had someone else try this (is there suddenly more interest in the NC200?).

What's happening is that the generated image doesn't occupy the entire disk, and the Gotek isn't smart enough to extend the image. If you truncate it to 720kB with something like truncate --size 720K nc200.img before putting it on the USB stick, the Gotek should be perfectly happy with it.

[GrantMeStrength]

Sadly that didn't seem to do much, other than increase the size of the file (as expected).

[davidgiven]

Huh. It worked for the other person. They were using the FlashFloppy firmware. Although they were seeing an E31 error, which isn't what you reported.

I don't have a Gotek, and don't really know how they work; do you need to tell it it's in an NC200? If so, could you try telling it it's in a PC instead? (There are sector skew differences between disks formatted by the NC200 and a PC.)

[GrantMeStrength]

I tried again with a clean USB drive, and made two copies of nc200.img, and resized one of them to be 720K.

Neither boot, but the 720K file does cause the E31 error to pop up. So something is happening, just not what I wanted to happen :-)

I don't think I can mess with the version of gotek firmware that the drive is running. It knows it's an NC200 (at least once the right init files are downloaded) as it can save and load to other img files.

It's possible that the config files on the USB need altered to be able to boot the nc200.img, so that's an avenue I will investigate. Thanks for your time!

[davidgiven]

facepalm

Truncate the file to 720KB. If you just use a K you get 720000 bytes.

[jcs]

A truncate --size 737280 nc200.img worked for me on my NC200 with a Gotek unit.

[Xalior]

If using MacOS, and truncate from homebrew, truncate -s 737280 nc200.img also works a treat for stretching the images to gotek size, and eliminates the E31 errors on the default release images.

-Dx