Using a USB floppy emulator with the Fluke 9100
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... 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 _______________________________________________ Techtoolslist mailing list Techtoolslist@flippers.com https://pairlist7.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/techtoolslist FTP site is: ftp://ttl.arcadetech.org/TTL/Test_Equipment Archive site: http://seven.pairlist.net/pipermail/techtoolslist/
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...
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 :-#)# -- How to subscribe or unsubscribe from TTL http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/techtoolslist _______________________________________________ Techtoolslist mailing list Techtoolslist@flippers.com https://pairlist7.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/techtoolslist FTP site is: ftp://ttl.arcadetech.org/TTL/Test_Equipment Archive site: http://seven.pairlist.net/pipermail/techtoolslist/
On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 6:05 PM, John Robertson <jrr@flippers.com> wrote:
can you tell us which setting you have the 9100 set to for the Floppy Emulator?
Sony. That's what drives (2 of them) were in my 9105FT when I acquired it and I didn't need to change the config to use the Gotek. It is _possible_ that the Gotek won't be sensitive to the config value but I've not tried changing it.
I have to wonder if the 9100 can utilize two Floppies if one pokes around
If you configure the mainframe as a 9105 (via the service disk) it is then configured to boot the OS from DR1 and load user disks from DR2. It's possible to change the source for userdisks to DR1 via SETUP/POD/USERDISK. So it may be possible to modify the OS9 filesystem somehow to see DR1 and DR2 when in 9100 mode (for copy source) but I've not spent any time doing this because there is no way to get the firmware to boot from DR2 (only DR1 via SOFT+F2+F4). This is why I went with the DPDT switch (since I had 2 floppy bays available) though practically I doubt I will ever use the physical floppy again since everything that seems to be known to exist is now in the github archive and having everything on 1 USB stick is just way more convenient. _______________________________________________ Techtoolslist mailing list Techtoolslist@flippers.com https://pairlist7.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/techtoolslist FTP site is: ftp://ttl.arcadetech.org/TTL/Test_Equipment Archive site: http://seven.pairlist.net/pipermail/techtoolslist/
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