Originally Posted by
BFHammer
FYI: Notes on replacing two floppy drives with USB floppy emulators.
Do a search for ipcas floppy emulator software. This is much better than the crap that comes with the emulator.
If you're even thinking about doing this download it now in case they change their mind on giving it away.
Not sure yet as I'm not totally back up and running but I think you need this software to save files to the thumb drive.
The emulator was a Gotek that I bought from Newegg. Jumper settings from factory worked fine.
The USB thumb drive I bought for the system disk was one of those SanDisk 8GB drives that's not much bigger that the USB connector itself.
The software parses it up into, I think 99 separate floppy "folders" each folder accessible on the omniturn by changing the folder number on the emulator.
The most startling thing to me is that you need to use the factory supplied system disk making program (sysgt.exe) available on the omniturn website.
Copying a system disk files to the thumb drive will not work. Still not sure why but I know this is the case.
I had to open my desktop PC and put the emulator in place of the floppy then run sysgt.exe and it created the system on the little thumb drive.
The emulator was set to file #00. It doesn't really matter as long as you keep it on the same number forever.
Remember that offsets will be zeroed out as well as lube calendar and axis greasing reminders.
If you've changed to LCD monitor you need to mess with a couple things but I have notes on that.
By the way, I was very disappointed that the machine will NOT boot any faster.
When putting the emulators in and connecting them up I did put them in the same order with the system floppy on the bottom and the program files on top.
The ribbon cable goes from the motherboard to the top floppy and the end of the ribbon cable goes to the bottom, system floppy.
If I remember right this does make a difference as to which one is the A drive and which is the B drive.
Keep the red edge of the ribbon cable going to the #1 pin or the one closest to the power cable.
I had to remove a pin on the emulator to fit to my pc cable as it had a blocked off socket. Evidently had some standards changed in the early years.
For the time I spent figuring this out I would have been better off buying the setup from omniturn.
Hope this helps.