Getting floppy drives working on legacy platforms is not easy. As mechanical drives and floppy disks age their failure rates go up. Since no new drives are being built (outside of 3.5″ drives), the number of functioning drives and disks keeps going down. This problem is particularly acute on retro systems that only have rare 8″ or custom drives like knitting machines, early word processors, industrial equipment, and musical instruments from the 80’s and 90’s.

Enter Gotek devices. These devices are designed to plug into your legacy hardware and use new solid state memory so your legacy hardware can boot off of disk images. They plug right into a standard floppy drive port and emulate the hardware your system is expecting. Instead of physical magnetic media, it uses image files stored on a modern solid state drive.

Links:

• https://www.gotekemulator.com/ – Home of Gotek devices. Gives you all the information you need to pick the right device for your needs.
• HxC Floppy Emulator firmware for Gotek – firmware that adds interesting features to your Gotek device such as emulating 5.25″, 3.5″, and 8″ drives, FM / SD, MFM / DD or HD densities, bitrates, rpm support, modified sector and track skewing/interleaving, and many more
• https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy